Mike Ladisch

Mike Ladisch is CTO of Mascoma Corporation.  He has served as Director of the Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering at Purdue University where he is a Distinguished Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, and a courtesy appointment in Food Science. 

Dr. Ladisch’s research addresses fundamental topics in bioprocess engineering as it applies to bio-energy, bioproducts, biorecovery, and bionanotechnology. The research is multidisciplinary and multi-institutional and addresses transformation of renewable resources into bioproducts, properties of proteins and living organisms at surfaces, rapid prototyping of microfluidic biosensors, and bioseparations. This research has resulted in new industrial bioenergy processes, and systematic approaches and correlations for scale-up of laboratory chromatographic purification techniques to process-scale manufacturing systems as well as scale-down of bioseparations, and the rapid prototyping of microfluidic biochips for the rapid detection of pathogenic microorganisms.

In the area of biofuels, Dr. Ladisch co-founded Celsys which addressed cellulose processing for the production of fuel ethanol, and was acquired in November, 2007 by Mascoma Corporation.  Professor Ladisch is currently serving as the Chief Technology Officer at Mascoma to promote the further development and commercialization of this technology.  His discovery and learning activities engage bioproduct, biopharmaceutical, and biotechnology industries on a national basis.

He earned his BS (1973) from Drexel University and MS (1974) and PhD (1977) from Purdue University, all in chemical engineering.  Dr. Ladisch has a broad background in bioscience and bioengineering, and has authored a textbook entitled “Bioseparations Engineering: Principles, Practice and Economics” (Wiley, 2001), 150 journal and proceedings papers, 14 patents (issued and applied for), and has presented over 100 papers.  He is on the advisory board of the Society for Biological Engineering (SBE).