Dr. Francesca Pierobon is Visiting Faculty at CINTRAFOR. She holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D in Land, Environment, Resources and Health from the University of Padua in Italy. She is a Chemical Engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a UW-PNNL Faculty Fellow at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and a WSU-PNNL Joint Appointee at the Bioproducts, Sciences, and Engineering Laboratory.
Dr. Pierobon specializes in renewable energy, chemicals, and materials derived from a variety of feedstocks, including forest and agricultural waste, energy crops, and other resources. Her work primarily focuses on chemical process simulation, Techno-Economic Analyses (TEA), and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) applied to innovative products and processes.
Dr. Pierobon joined CINTRAFOR in May of 2013 as a student intern for a one-year internship. She then worked as a Post-doctoral Research Associate and Research Scientist from 2015 to 2022. Her passion for the environment and her interest in the exploration of new strategies to improve the sustainability of processes and products have driven her to undertake her path. While at the UW she received a USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on the TEA and LCA of producing polylactic acid and lignin-based co-products from residual woody biomass. She also worked on several bioenergy projects, including the NARA project to look at the production of woody biomass-based jet fuel. She led several LCA projects including mass timber and its use in multi-story buildings and contributed to the advancement of LCA methodologies to incorporate temporal dynamics of carbon emissions and sequestration into the evaluation of the environmental impact of bio-based materials and resources.
Dr. Pierobon mentored three Ph.D students and five Master’s students at CINTRAFOR. She taught an Analysis class and a Life Cycle Assessment class at the University of Washington and was invited as guest lecturer at several UW classes.