Gunnar Westin

Advisor and active partner

Professor Gunnar Westin (Ph.D. 1995, Docent 1998) pioneered the sol-gel processing in Sweden during the late 80:s at Stockholm University, and moved his group to Uppsala University in the year 2000.

Already from the start he has been involved in many industry collaborations as bilateral projects or in larger projects financed partly by e.g. Vinnova and SSF, and until now some 20 companies (or divisions in companies) have collaborated. Some processes have been up-scaled to pilot plant (e.g. ZnO varistor, Solar thermal coatings with S-solar) or large scale manufacture (Superior hard compact composites) or their faith is unknown after positive tests by industry (e.g. KNN piezoelectric films). Westin has worked part time at ABB Corporate research and is internationally quite renown in his field and has given over 70 Invited and Keynote talks at the most prestigious conferences around the world as well as 50 invited seminars at leading Universities around the world such as UC Berkeley, U. Princeton, MIT, UCLA, Stanford, IBM Almaden, U. Osaka, Tokyo U., Tokyo U. Science, Tsinghua U., Shanghai Jiaotong U., Fudan U., Nanyang Technological U. and been and elected member of the International Sol-Gel Society 2004-2009.

Westin is also co-founder, co-director and adjunct professor of the International research center fro renewable energy at Xian Jiaotong University in China and Director of the center for functional materials at the newly established Institute for New Energy, Shenzhen, China which develops ideas and patents to companies.