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Sapienza University of Rome is one of the oldest universities in the world and a high performer among the largest universities in international rankings. Since its founding over 700 years ago, Sapienza has played an important role in Italian history and has been directly involved in key changes and developments in society, economics and politics.

It has contributed to the development of Italian and European science and culture in all areas of knowledge. The University carries out outstanding scientific research in most disciplines, achieving excellent results both on a national and international level.

Department of Chemistry is one of the biggest Departments of “La Sapienza” (around 85 faculty staff). It holds a distinguished history and a tradition of excellence in research and teaching on practically all field of chemistry. In the present project, the research unit of Chemical Engineering will be involved, which also has relevant expertise in industrial biotechnology, and whose expertise will be completed by other colleagues who are experts on polymer science. Over the last years, this range of different expertise has been already combined resulting in highly multidisciplinary research, mainly dealing with anaerobic and/or aerobic biological processes for treatment of wastes and wastewaters and recovery of valuable products from them. In particular, a long experience has been gained on storage of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) by mixed microbial cultures and its exploitation for production of biodegradable polymers from wastes and by-products, including agro-industrial ones (e.g. olive oil mill wastewater).