Wytze Meindersma received his master’s degree in Chemical Engineering in 1974 at the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands, in the group of Prof.dr.ir. N.W.F. Kossen on “The effect of pH and oxygen pressure on the morphology of Penicillium chrysogenum during fermentation”. From 1974 to 1981, he was employed by AVEBE in Veendam, a potato starch company, where he started to work with membranes, developing membrane filtration in the potato starch industry from laboratory scale (0.36 m2) to industrial scale (6200 m2). In 1981, he continued his work in membranes at DSM Research, where he became the membrane specialist. He was involved in the development of several industrial membrane processes at DSM. From May 1998, he worked in the Sector Industrial Services of DSM Research with the main focus on water management.

In July 2000, he started to work as lecturer in the Separation Technology group of Prof. dr.ir. A.B. de Haan at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, and also started a PhD project on the subject “Separation of aromatic compounds from liquid ethylene cracker feeds”. He obtained his Ph.D degree on 9-9-2005 and the title of his thesis is: “Extraction of Aromatics from Naphtha with Ionic Liquids. From Solvent Development to Pilot RDC Evaluation”.

In April 2007, he started to work at the Eindhoven University of Technology as an assistant professor with main research fields: ionic liquids in liquid-liquid extraction of aromatics from mixtures of aromatic and aliphatic hydrocarbons, extractive distillation with ionic liquids (a SenterNovem project) and extraction and recovery of carbonyl compounds form pyrolysis oil (an EU project Biocoup).

His work on ionic liquids includes 20 journal and conference papers, four book chapters, one contribution to an encyclopedia (Ullmann) and one patent application. His initial four papers on ionic liquids have now been cited more than 200 times.