Rate My Professor Simon Kuhn

Simon Kuhn is a full professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at KU Leuven's Faculty of Engineering Science. He heads the Process Engineering for Sustainable Systems (ProcESS) research group, the Subdivision Transport Phenomena, and serves as contact person for ProcESS in Leuven (Arenberg). He is also a member of the SIM² KU Leuven Institute for Sustainable Metals and Minerals. His research group, Transport Processes and Reactions, centers on experimental and computational investigations of transport processes and reactions, addressing transport limitations and their scale-up from laboratory to production scales. Expertise encompasses micro- and milli-scale flow reactors, multiphase flows including gas-liquid and liquid-liquid systems, computational fluid dynamics, laser-based flow characterization, coalescence and breakage phenomena in stirred vessels, ultrasound applications, cavitation, microfluidics, photoreactors, nanoparticle synthesis, spherical crystallization, process intensification, continuous manufacturing of fine chemicals, integration of non-conventional green energy sources such as photo- and electrochemistry, batch-to-continuous transitions, and handling solids in flow reactors through clogging prevention and controlled particle synthesis.

Kuhn completed his undergraduate studies at the Technical University of Munich and earned his PhD at ETH Zurich. He held a postdoctoral position at MIT, then joined University College London as a lecturer in 2012, advancing to assistant professor. In 2014, he was appointed associate professor at KU Leuven and subsequently promoted to full professor. His achievements include the European Research Council Starting Grant awarded in 2015 and the ERC Consolidator Grant for the MicroDisCo project. Key publications feature '3D printing in chemical engineering and catalytic technology: structured catalysts, mixers and reactors' (Chemical Society Reviews, 2018), 'Scale-up of Micro-and Milli-Reactors: An Overview of Strategies, Design Principles and Applications' (Chemical Engineering Science: X, 2021), 'Size-controlled flow synthesis of gold nanoparticles using a segmented flow microfluidic platform' (Langmuir, 2012), 'Continuous Ultrasonic Reactors: Design, Mechanism and Application' (Materials, 2020), 'Suzuki–Miyaura cross‐coupling reactions in flow: multistep synthesis enabled by a microfluidic extraction' (Angewandte Chemie, 2011), and recent contributions such as 'On the same wavelength with cavitation bubbles' (Nature Chemical Engineering, 2025) and 'The overestimated capability of fluid shear to induce secondary nucleation: an urgent call for diligently executed control experiments' (CrystEngComm, 2025).