Prof. dr hab. inż. Katarzyna Grabowska, is the Dean of the Faculty of Material Technologies and Textile Design of Lodz University of Technology. After doctoral studies at the Faculty of Textile Technology in 1997 she obtained her doctoral degree with honours and started to work at the newly established Department of Textile Architecture. In 2007 she was awarded a postdoctoral degree in the field of textile science.
Since 2000 she has been working closely with the University of Ghent in Belgium - she is the author of 4 bilateral grants between Belgium and Poland. In 2012 she was an intern in the TOP500 Programme at the University of California Berkeley. In 2013 - 2014 she was twice invited as a visiting professor to CSIRO in Melburne and Geelong, Australia, where she held research internships.
Prof. Grabowska's research interests concern the construction of physical, mathematical models, including statistical models describing the properties of linear textile products, with extended surfaces. Her first research work in the field of linear fibre composites began immediately after her doctoral degree and resulted in the award of national and bilateral grants and then numerous publications listed in the Philadelphia List.
Prof. Grabowska's scientific achievements in the field of fancy threads resulted in numerous citations in Journal Citation Reports and enabled her to clearly establish her position as an authority and founder of the school of decorative yarns. The acquisition of 5 national patents and one European patent should be mentioned as a scientific achievement.
The license for the patent "Hybrid yarn for electromagnetic induction", whose creator is Prof. Grabowska, was sold to industry. While a monograph published in 2019 in English entitled: "Fancy Threads" is a summary of many years of research. She has authored numerous publications presented at global conferences. She was a leader in 10 research grants.
Prof. Katarzyna Grabowska was awarded the National Education Medal (2008) for her work. She also received the Gold Medal for "Excellent and Creative efforts to invent Textile Charger for Mobile Devices" at the Seoul (Korea) International Exhibition in 2019 and the Gold Medal for "Textile Charger for Powering Mobile Devices such as Smartphones, Tablets" awarded by the Polish Patent Office in 2019.
Since 2009, she has been Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Autex Res. J. In 2016, she joined as a member of the Editorial Board of the international journal FIBERS AND TEXTILES IN EASTERN EUROPE. In 2016, she achieved the highest international status in textiles - she was elected President of the International Association of Universities for Textiles AUTEX. From 2016 to 2019 she served as Vice President of EUROPEAN TEXTILE PLATFORM ETP.
Prof. dr hab. inż. Dawid Stawski graduated from the Faculty of Textiles, Łódź in 2000. In the same year he started his doctoral studies at the Department of Physical Chemistry of Polymers at the University of Lodz. After four years (2004) he defended his doctoral dissertation thesis entitled "Modification of unsaturated starch esters with amines and thiols".
Since October 2004 he has been working at Lodz University of Technology as an assistant professor. First at the Department of Physical Chemistry of Polymers, and now at the Institute of Material Science of Textile and Polymer Composites. In 2012 he was awarded a postdoctoral degree as a result of a successful habilitation procedure (monograph entitled: "Advanced surface analysis of polypropylene fibres in flat textile products modified with polyelectrolyte nanolayers").
Scientific interests of Prof. Stawski focus on issues related to thermal analysis, chemical modification of polymers, modification of the surface layer in polymeric materials and the application of layer-by-layer method for modification of textiles.
His scientific output to date, in which he has described his research results, includes 54 articles in foreign and domestic peer-reviewed journals, including three chapters in scientific monographs, and 66 papers and proceedings at scientific conferences. His current Hirsch Index according to Scopus database is 12.
Professor Stawski is the supervisor of two doctoral theses. After 2000, he held research fellowships at the Leibniz Institut für Polymerforschung in Dresden (Abteilung Polymergrenzflächen) (2008 and 2012), the University of Agder in Kristiansand (Functional Ecology Group) (2009 and 2016) and the University of Iceland, Reykjavik (2014).
Since 2009 he has lectured abroad in Norway, Germany, Iceland, Belarus and Hungary. In 2019 he took a course in modern teaching methods at Olin College (USA). He has received fellowships from the Foundation for Polish Science and Partners Poland Foundation, an international grant from the Visegrad Fund and a grant from the National Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR) under the Polish-Norwegian Research Cooperation program.
He is an expert evaluating projects for Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR) and Polish Agency for Enterprise Development (PARP).