Dr. Robin D. Rogers is President, Owner, and Founder of 525 Solutions, Inc., in Tuscaloosa, AL USA and a Research Professor at The University of Alabama. In 2019-2020 he also served as Tage Erlander Professor at Stockholm University to help bring sustainable development to Sweden. Since 2019 he has been an Honorary Professor in the School of Engineering, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

He obtained both his B.S. in Chemistry (1978, Summa Cum Laude) and his Ph.D. in Chemistry (1982) at The University of Alabama before starting his professorial career at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL where he rose through the ranks to become Presidential Research Professor. In 1996, he returned to UA as a Professor where he held various titles including Director of the Center for Green Manufacturing (1998-2014), Distinguished Research Professor (2004-2014), and Robert Ramsay Chair of Chemistry (2005-2014). In 2007, he was also Chair of Green Chemistry and Co-Director of QUILL at The Queen’s University of Belfast in Northern Ireland (UK) before returning full time to UA from 2009-2014. In 2015, he became Canada Excellence Research Chair in Green Chemistry and Green Chemicals at McGill University in Montreal, QC, Canada, where he remained until 2017, when he returned full time to the start-up company he founded in 2004 to accelerate the introduction of academic advances in sustainable development directly to Society.

Rogers holds 33 issued patents (plus numerous foreign equivalents) of which 17 are licensed and has published over 878 papers on a diverse array of topics. His research interests cover the use of ionic liquids and Green Chemistry for sustainable technology through innovation and include Materials (advanced polymeric and composite materials from biorenewables), Separations (novel strategies for separation and purification of value added products from biomass), Energy (new energetic materials and selective separations), and Medicine (elimination of waste while delivering improved pharmaceutical performance). Most recently he has embarked on an effort to utilize biorenewable polymers such as chitin and cellulose in an effort to eliminate the need for synthetic plastics.

He has been cited over 66,000 times, has a Hirsch index of 108, and an i10 index of 640. Rogers was named in the 2014 and 2015 Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers Lists ranking among the top 1% most cited in chemistry. In 2006, Rogers was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and in 2009 was selected to the inaugural class of American Chemical Society Fellows. In 2010, he was named a Chinese Academy of Sciences Visiting Senior Scientist for the Institute for Process Engineering, Beijing, China. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012 and that same year named an ACS Division of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Fellow.

Rogers is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the American Chemical Society journal Crystal Growth & Design, a position he held from 2000-2019. He is also an advisory board member of Separation Science & Technology, Solvent Extraction and Ion Exchange, Chemistry Letters, Green Chemistry, Chemical Communications, Chimica Oggi/Chemistry Today, Green Energy & Environment. and Journal of Ionic Liquids

He has had an influential role in the expansion of interest and research in ionic liquid systems, his initial paper on ionic liquid/aqueous partitioning (Chem. Comm. 1998, 1765) effectively kick-started interest in applying ionic liquids to clean separations. In 2005, he was awarded the US Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (Academic Division) for work related to the use of ionic liquids in sustainable technology. This technology was licensed later that year to BASF. He was awarded the American Chemical Society Separations Science & Technology award in 2011 and in 2012, he was named recipient of the Paul Walden Award given by the DFG-SPP 1191 Priority Program on Ionic Liquids. In 2018, he was awarded the Max Bredig Award in Molten Salt and Ionic Liquid Chemistry, Presented by the Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry Division of the Electrochemical Society. In 2018, his joint venture, Mari Signum Ltd., was awarded the American Chemical Society/Environmental Protection Agency Green Chemistry Challenge Award Focus Area 2, Greener Reaction Conditions to Mari Signum Mid-Atlantic, LLC for “A Practical Way to Mass Production of Chitin: The Only Facility in the U. S. to Use Ionic Liquid-Based Isolation Process.”

Rogers has co-organized a variety of meetings and symposia on Industrial Applications of Ionic Liquids and in 2004 founded 525 Solutions, Inc. to help translate new ionic liquids technologies to Society. He is also currently part owner of 525 SDT LLC, Wyonics LLC, Adjacency Labs Corporation, CalAgua Innovations Corporation, and RGP-525 LLC. His joint venture, Mari Signum Ltd., was acquired in 2019 by the Ross Group, a UK-based publicly traded company. The breadth of educational, research, industrial, editorial, and service endeavors gives Rogers a broad perspective on science and engineering research, development, and technology transfer.

Larry Canada is a seasoned litigator who specializes in cases involving professional liability, employment, intellectual property and commercial litigation. He began his legal career on the plaintiff's side, handling toxic tort and product liability claims. After two and a half years, he was hired by Galloway, Johnson, Tompkins, Burr & Smith, against whom he had litigated several cases. Mr. Canada served as a Director with the firm of Galloway, Johnson, Tompkins, Burr & Smith. Currently he is a Senior Trial Counsel with UA’s Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program department.