MASSIMO NORO

Unilever

Massimo Noro is a Science Leader at Unilever R&D Port Sunlight (UK), the largest global research laboratory of the company. Unilever is a large multinational and a market leader in the fast moving consumer goods business, with well known products in the sectors of home care, personal care, refreshments and foods. Massimo is the director of the Unilever strategic collaboration with STFC Daresbury on high performance computing. STFC Daresbury is a Tier-1 National computing facility in the UK of strategic importance for the development of the UK eScience infrastructure. Massimo’s scientific background is theory and simulations of complex fluids, with a special interest in biological systems.

e-Science in Unilever: The Challenges Ahead

Unilever is a large multinational and a market leader in the fast moving consumer goods business, with well known products in the sectors of home care, personal care, refreshments and foods . Unilever has set for itself very ambitious targets: to double the size of the business by 2020, and at the same time decreasing its environmental impact – we call this strategy “the Compass”, as it helps to guide our way into difficult and uncharted territories. Unilever R&D has been charged with the vital role of enabling this change through delivering bigger, better, faster innovations to market. Our significant R&D resource however we do not have a monopoly on the best science or technology and need to partner with the best – and we need to embrace new ways of doing R&D.

The digital revolution is already permeating everything we do at home: how could we pay our bills without eBanking, connect with our friends without Facebook, or find our way around without SatNav? The same revolution is helping us move faster at work. Worldwide more technical data has been collected in the past year alone than in all previous years since science began. But how can we make this digital science revolution work for us?