Startups, Industrial Biotechnology, Cellular Agriculture, Engineering Driven R&D and Capital Project Delivery, R&D and Scaleup, Process Implementation and Engineering, Technoeconomic Modeling.

Dilum is a chemical engineer with a distinguished career spanning over two decades in industrial biotechnology and cellular agriculture. As a seasoned engineering leader, he has made significant contributions to the development and scale-up of novel technologies for producing fermentation-based chemicals and ingredients.

At BioAmber, Inc., which Dilum co-founded, he played a pivotal role in the commercialization of biobased succinic acid. His responsibilities included managing multiple generations of process technologies and leading scale-up efforts from lab to commercial scale culminating in a groundbreaking 30,000 mt/y fermentation-based production plant for succinic acid.

Dilum’s leadership at Perfect Day, Inc. showcased the utility and value of an engineering-driven project delivery process tailored for startup companies. The insights spawned by the mechanisms of the process resulted in the realignment of R&D initiatives and corporate financial planning. Notably, he scaled up Perfect Day’s fermentation using a method that normalized the effects of scale from 2L laboratory fermentors to 500,000 L production fermentors, while balancing requirements for performance and capital/operating costs.

Dilum’s academic background includes a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Michigan State University, where he also earned a Master of Science (M.S.) in Chemical Engineering and a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Chemistry. He has authored over ten peer-reviewed publications and more than twenty patent families. Contact Dilum.