Ngoc Nguyen

Dr Ngoc N. Nguyen is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) and a Discovery Early-Career Researcher Award recipient (DECRA Fellow) granted by Australian Research Council (ARC), at School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia. Prior to the current position, he was awarded an Australia Award Scholarship by the Australian Government for studying at UQ and attained a PhD in Chemical Engineering at UQ in 2018. After completing his PhD, he was awarded a world-renowned Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Fellowship by the AvH Foundation (the German Government) and worked as an AvH fellow at the Department of Physics at Interfaces, Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (Germany) for three years (2019-2021). Dr Nguyen used to work as a visiting scholar to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in USA and a lecturer at Hanoi University of Science and Technology in Vietnam. He recently secured a prestigious ARC DECRA Fellowship (2024-2027). He is also an associate investigator within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Eco-enabling Beneficiation of Minerals.

His research strives for creating cutting-edge knowledge and innovations in three inter-related pillars of the low-carbon economy:

(1) sustainable energy,

(2) natural resources including critical metals,

(3) innovative approaches for tackling environmental issues such as CO2 emissions and mine waste.

He is working concurrently in these pillars. In particular, he is leading an ARC DECRA project about unconventional energy storage by locking fuel gases (e.g., hydrogen, methane) in the solid lattice of water, taking the intrinsic advantages of water as the cheapest, safest and most sustainable feedstock on Earth. Besides, he is working actively in eco-efficient extraction and separation of valuable resources from the Earth's crust toward a sustainable mineral processing industry for supplying sufficient commodities (e.g., metals) for the energy transition. In addition, Dr Nguyen has enduring interest in creating innovations for tackling pressing environment problems such as CO2 emissions, with special interest in carbon capture and storage and utilisation, as well as addressing the mine waste in the mineral processing industry and the recylcing of critical metal-containing waste.