Dr. Aristidou is an entrepreneurial leader with more than 20 years of international technical and operational leadership experience in the area of bioprocess and biocatalyst development with expertise in leading teams of multi-disciplinary scientists involved in the development, scale-up and technology transfer of commercial processes. He was one of the founding members of two of the world’s leading bio-based product companies, namely, NatureWorks and Gevo. He was elected in the National Academy of Engineering in 2018 and, in 2022 he became a Cargill Corporate Fellow.

Dr. Aristidou has been with Cargill for approximately a decade, serving in multiple roles within Corporate R&D. Currently, he is the Platform Lead for Biotechnology and BioIntermediates and, prior to that he served as Director at Cargill’s Biotechnology Research & Development Center, a global organization that develops new products and improves processes for the food, feed, and industrial segments of Cargill. Prior to that he led the global Fermentation R&D group, as well as provided technical leadership on a number of innovation projects aimed at developing new products for Cargill.

Prior to Cargill, Dr. Aristidou served as Vice President of Bioprocess Development at Gevo, a leading Renewable Fuels and Chemical company that has applied a combination of biotechnology and chemistry to developed bio-based alternatives to petroleum-based products, such as high octane gasoline blendstocks, jet fuel, rubber, plastics, and polyesters. Prior to this, Dr. Aristidou served as a technical leader at Cargill Dow, which subsequently became NatureWorks, where he contributed to the development, scale up and commercial implementation of new technologies for the production of biopolymers from renewable resources that are still utilized at full commercial scale.

Between 1997 and 2001, Dr. Aristidou worked as a Group Leader of Bioprocess R&D at the Institute of Biotechnology of the National Technical Research Center (VTT), in Espoo, Finland. VTT provides research and innovation services for domestic and international customers and partners, both in the private and public sectors and it employees approximately 2,500 scientists and engineers. Concurrently, he also held a position as an adjunct Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Helsinki University of Technology, where he taught a number of graduate level courses, as well as mentored several M.S. or Ph.D. students.

Dr. Aristidou holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering (1989) and a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering (1994) from William Marsh Rice University. He has also completed Postdoctoral studies in Chemical Engineering (1997) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Prof. Gregory Stephanopoulos. He has co-author more than 30 peer reviewed scientific articles in the area of biochemical engineering and is an inventor on more than 45 patents in the field of industrial biotechnology. He has also co-authored a textbook on Metabolic Engineering and has contributed chapters in multiple edited books.