Education

At the Institute for Sustainable and Circular Chemistry we train the chemists needed for a sustainable future – Master students, PhD candidates and Postdoctoral fellows alike – by offering an open, inclusive, and inspiring environment for education and research; an environment that embraces multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches. We wish to educate the “connectors” of the future, thereby reaching out to other scientific disciplines as well as to our society, to make our living healthier and more sustainable.

New Master's programme (available from 2024)

The new MCSC (Master Circular and Sustainable Chemistry) is a chemistry research Master's programme with the objective to equip graduates with the necessary knowledge and skills needed to play an active role in the energy, resource and material transitions. To move away from our current largely fossil based material needs, to break out of the linear take-make-waste paradigm, and to lift the enormous environmental burden of our current consumption, chemists need to design, synthesize, and investigate molecules and materials that are inherently safe, circular, and sustainable.

The Master's programme will train and educate a new generation of chemistry researchers by giving them a strong foundation in chemistry, with emphasis on synthetic chemistry, catalysis, and analytical and environmental chemistry, coupled with the ability and curiosity to look across the boundaries of science and to connect to different disciplines outside chemistry. The master adopts a systems-thinking approach to the sustainability transition, reaching out across disciplines using chemistry as a bridging and key enabling science. The core theme of the master is sustainable chemistry, i.e. an integrated combination of chemical reactions and processes that does no longer rely on fossil feedstocks, involves clean and resource-efficient production processes that yield materials that are safe and circular by design.

The Master's programme targets Dutch and international students with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry or chemical engineering, or a college bachelor with a pre-master.

The ideal graduate from this course:

  • Has a solid disciplinary foundation in molecular chemistry, catalysis, and/or analytical chemistry
  • Has gained practical skills in and experience with state-of-the art research on sustainable chemistry
  • Has basic knowledge of adjacent disciplines, value chains, and the inter- and transdisciplinary aspects of systemic sustainability changes:
  • Thinks in terms of connections and has adopted a systems thinking approach to chemistry and sustainability
  • Has an overview of the trending developments within circular chemistry
  • Has knowledge of methods and techniques from data science (computational chemistry, data analysis, machine learning/AI).
  • Has knowledge to quantitatively substantiate sustainability/circularity by means of tools and metrics
  • Is intrinsically motivated to bring about change within academia or industry
  • Fits in multidisciplinary teams of the customer field and ‘speaks the language’

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