The WACKER ACADEMY Team of Instructors
Theoretical expertise and practical experience are the cornerstones of the WACKER ACADEMY team. With backgrounds in sales or technology, our experts come to the table with extensive application knowledge. They are also trained instructors and moderators with a sixth sense for current trends and market developments.
Chemical Industry Instructors
Sougata Bhattacharya
Sougata Bhattacharya has been associated with WACKER METROARK CHEMICALS Pvt. Ltd. since 2004 and is based at the Amtala Plant near Kolkata. He is currently responsible for leading the technical service team, customer training and the formulation and application development of all market segments in the Silicones division, including Consumer Care, Textiles, Chemical Industry, Elastomers, Construction and Coatings. He has a Master of Science in Chemistry from Calcutta University.
Cheryl Fan
Cheryl Fan is a senior technical manager at the WACKER Shanghai technical center and is in charge of technical service and support for HDK® fumed silica for Asia Pacific. She has been involved in sealants and adhesives, as well as in coatings research and development activities and product applications. Cheryl Fan joined the Shanghai center in July 2013.
Josef Gong
Josef Gong is a China technical manager at WACKER Shanghai technical center. He is mainly responsible for promotion and technical support of VAE dispersions for industrial and chemical consumer goods in China.
Dr. Linrong Gu
Lingrong (Linna) joined WACKER right after completing a PhD in Organic Chemistry from Clemson University in South Carolina. She is the Technical Manager for the Pulp and Industrial defoamers Business Team SPI responsible for developing new defoaming and antifoaming products to various industries. Linna also has a MS in Polymers Chemistry and Physics and a BS in Chemistry from Zhejiang University in China.
Dr. Hardy Herold
Dr. Hardy Herold studied Chemistry at the Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen (Germany), and obtained a doctorate in the field of geophysics. After spending two years at KWU (Siemens subsidiary), he started at WACKER POLYMERS in October 1989, working in Technical Marketing, where he supported customers around the world. During this period, he spent substantial periods abroad, including as technical center head in both Moscow (Russia) and Allentown (USA). Since November 2021, Dr. Herold has been a trainer at WACKER ACADEMY Europe.
Kenji Igarashi
Surabhi Jain
Surabhi Jain joined WACKER in 2020 as Manager Technical Services for Mumbai Technical Center. She holds a M.Tech. degree in Polymer Science & Technology from Indian Institute of Technology- IIT Delhi. She has about 12 years of experience in construction chemicals and applications. She supports for training customers in applications for Plaster, Skimcoat and Waterproofing membrane.
Dr. Marion Killat
Dr. Marion Killat studied and received her doctorate in chemistry at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. Following a post-doctoral stay in the USA, she started her career at WACKER in research and development at WACKER POLYMERS. Shortly after the founding of WACKER ACADEMY, she became a member of the trainer team with a focus on various products and applications of the POLYMERS division. In 2020, she took over the management of WACKER ACADEMY Europe.
Michael Killermann
Michael Killermann joined WACKER in 1992 in the analytical department. From 1996 to 2008, he worked as a lab technician in the Building & Coatings business team, where he was in charge of technical distributor support for industrial coatings. He was recruited to the WACKER ACADEMY training team as a practical instructor in May 2008.
Danis Liu
Danis Liu joined WACKER in 2014 as a technical manager at WACKER Shanghai technical center. He is in charge of technical service and support for Industrial coating, Plastic, Pulp and Industry Defoaming and Chemical Industrial products in China, as well as developing new silicone applications in these fields.
Guillermo Lopez
Guillermo is the sales manager for Mexico at the Performance Materials business unit. He has had two periods of employment at WACKER, initially from 1988 to 1992 and then from 2000. He has more than 36 years’ experience of the chemical industry, mainly with epoxy resins, polyurethanes, plastisol and release agents based on silicone fluids. At WACKER, Guillermo has been responsible for elastomers, pyrogenic silica, sealants, silanes and fluids, plastics, textiles, defoamers and industrial coating resins. Earlier, he worked for Hysol de Mexico, a company focused on epoxy resin compounds. He has a Chemical Engineering degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.