The Center of Excellence for Fermentation Process Design (FPD) is based at the recently inaugurated Lesaffre International Campus, the “Forum”, a state-of-the-art facility covering 23000m² and bringing together over 750 employees from Lesaffre’s Corporate R&D organization and the various business units of the company. 

Within the FPD team, the R&D Scientist defines, executes and reports workplans involving strain performance testing and/or fermentation process optimization. Collaborating with other experts in multi-disciplinary project teams, you will have a key role in bringing new or improved fermentation-based products to market for all the businesses of Lesaffre Group. 

Your responsibilities will include: 

• Definition of experimental plans and their execution, either individually or leading technicians  

• Data processing, critical analysis of results and reporting to various stakeholders 

• Tech transfer to pilot-scale and support to factory trials  

• Development of new process technologies (instrumentation, algorithms, scale-down models, etc) to meet novel or emerging business needs 

• Contribute to continuous improvement of practices and adoption of new techniques  

• Contribute to good maintenance of equipment and facilities as well as training of newcomers 

• Contribute to identification and development of IP opportunities  

• Passionate for working at the interface between Biology, Chemistry and Engineering and motivated to see your research in the lab turning into industrial processes and products  

• MSc in Biochemical Engineering, Biotechnology or equivalent, having excelled at microbiology and process technology 

• 3 years industrial experience or PhD in relevant field, preferably with exposure to more than one market, product type, microorganism, scale and/or process regime; experience with non-standard processes (gas fermentations, food fermentation, solid-state, in-situ extraction, cell immobilization, uncommon feedstocks) is a plus  

• Solid understanding of physiology and fermentation technology principles, incl. growth kinetics, balances, mass transfer and scale-specific considerations 

• Good inter-personal skills; demonstrated ability to work alongside technicians/operators and within multi-disciplinary projects  

• Good critical thinking skills, acting with rigor and integrity; demonstrated ability to translate research questions into intelligent and pragmatic experimental plans 

• Excellent computational skills and familiarity with DoE, statistics, data management and visualization tools; affinity for programming, bioinformatics, CFD or techno-economic modelling is a plus  

• Good communication skills, comfortable delivering results to both experts and non-experts; multinational work/life experience is a plus