Thiago Olitta Basso

Thiago Olitta Basso received his B.Sc. degree in Pharmacy and Biochemistry in 2003 by The University of São Paulo, Brazil. He was conferred his M.Sc. degree in Biotechnology in 2005 by The University of Abertay Dundee, Scotland, UK. During this period he studied brewing yeast physiology and biotechnology under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Graeme Walker. After his return to Brazil, he joined Fermentec, a consultancy company engaged at improving ethanol fermentation in Brazilian ethanol plants. He worked for about one year and a half in collaboration with researchers from The University of São Paulo to understand industrial yeast-bacterial interactions during ethanol fermentation. In 2007, he initiated his PhD in Biotechnology, at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, under the supervision of Dr. Andreas Karoly Gombert and Dr. Aldo Tonso and collaboration with Dr. Boris Stambuk, from The Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. Part of his PhD was carried out at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, under supervision of Prof. Dr. Jack Pronk, Dr. Ton van Maris and Dr. Jean Marc Daran. In June 2011 he received his PhD degree in Biotechnology for defending the thesis entitled “Improvement of Alcoholic Fermentation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by Evolutionary Engineering”. He has currently joined Novozymes as a Scientist, working on biofuels/biorefineries (yeast/bacteria physiology and fermentation optimization for traditional and advanced biofuels).