Dr. Mohini Sain

Personal Profile

After four years of daily counseling in one of the largest but highly polluted cities in India, I decided to contribute to reducing pollution where coal was a primary source of energy in the early ’80s. Receiving a UNESCO fellowship, I traveled to Europe to investigate the integration of natural materials in building cars and buses. Being a chemical engineer, I knew that a key issue lay in critically understanding pollutive components in air, water, and soil. So, I designed my future around exploring natural products for making greener materials. Words like sustainable development or climate crisis were not mainstream at that point—being ahead of the game allowed me to understand the key challenges society faced 35 years ago, public understanding, and technological breakthroughs to introduce green innovation in my daily life. After completing my doctoral study, I fully devoted my time to reducing the use of synthetic plastics by replacing them with technologically tuned sustainable natural materials such as biomass and their extracts, including macro-, micro-, and nano-form natural fibers such as wood pulp and sawdust to make a composite. In 1991, in collaboration with USDA, we created the world's first wood composite forum in Toronto to introduce our research to community businesses. This single meeting was the cornerstone of today’s multi-billion-dollar wood composite industry (WPC).

For the next 30 years, I spent my time in academia fostering industrial research. As a result, we broke new ground in developing high-performance micro- and nano-fiber composites for the automotive industry, leading to the first spin-off, “Greencore Composite Inc.,” in 2004, which, after more than 20 years in business holding over 20 global patents, was sold to Domtar. Seizing continuous opportunities to foster cutting-edge applied research in the bioeconomy, I continued to diversify my research and research implementation in sustainable packaging, biocarbon energy materials discovery and translation, and more recently in green energy and green hydrogen research and scale-up. Our research group at the Centre for Biocomposites and Biomaterials Processing at the University of Toronto today holds a key position in global sustainable materials research. As the Endowed Chair Professor of Ford Motor Canada PERDC, I am fortunate to pursue my dream of fostering green technology research, with over 20 million dollars in infrastructure investment and over 70 million dollars in grant money in my 35 years of professional life. With a team of over 40 researchers, we are exploring new avenues to produce hydrogen from farm residues and inventing new materials that serve sustainability and thrive beyond conventional streams by breaking new ground in biomedical devices, renewable energy, transportation, and building sectors. The main goal is to bring some of these research outcomes to the marketplace to reduce GHGs and increase the carbon footprint and embodied carbon.