Meet Dr. Roland Adden

Vice President R&D, IFF Pharma Solutions

A Passion for Science and the Outdoors

Roland Adden, PhD, is an esteemed chemist who is as comfortable wearing hiking boots as he is donning a lab coat. “Driving innovations into the marketplace – walking into pharmacies and supermarkets and seeing the developments we’ve enabled is very gratifying,” Roland shared. But, he also takes pride in working on sustainable solutions that can improve lives.

Sustainability is important both at work and personally, as he loves spending time outdoors with his family. Hiking, biking, and camping are his favorite leisure activities when he’s not comtemplating future R&D projects for IFF. “There are so many good ideas out there in the R&D universe. It’s energizing to think about where we should go next.”

“I like to understand the science behind things,” Roland said. “My PhD work focused on substituent distribution analysis of cellulosics, and I was hooked on structure property relations ever since.” That motivation set Roland on his career journey to IFF.

Roland earned his PhD in chemistry from Technical University Braunschweig (Germany) and began work at Bayer (Wolff Cellulosics). He started in product development creating new polymers across all application segments – first in construction and industrial, then in food and pharmaceuticals. In 2015 he was tapped to lead the food applications R&D team at Dow Pharma and Food Solutions. After the Dow-Dupont merger, he headed up Dupont’s innovation center in Bomlitz, Germany, as well as the product development team. Another merger brought him to IFF where he now oversees the entire R&D workstream for the Pharma Solutions business.

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