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Maureen Hassall is Professor and Director of the Sustainable Minerals Institute's Industrial Safety and Health Centre at the University of Queensland. Her expertises crosses the fields of industrial risk management, safety engineering and human factors. Maureen works collaboratively with industry professionals to develop better human-centred risk management and safety engineering approaches that improve companies’ operational performance and competitiveness. Maureen also develops and delivers process safety, systems safety engineering, risk management and human factors training, education and expert advice to students and to industry. Her industry-focused research is motivated by 18 years of industry experience working in a number of different countries and in a variety of roles including specialist engineering, line management, organisational change and business performance improvement roles.

Ian has been a research fellow in the School of Chemical Engineering since 2023. He has a diverse background in chemical engineering R&D, with PhD in chemical engineering at UQ, experience in pilot scale hydrometallurgy where he was a lead researcher in the product development team for AlphaHPA and has a growing researcher profile focussing on bioplastics production, modification, and applications, as well as their life-cycle assessments. His current research within the ARC Centre for Bioplastics and Biocomposites is supporting transition away from linear, non-degradable plastics toward a more circular economy through the production of a bioderived and biodegradable bioplastic called PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate) using halophilic biotechnology, with expertise in scaleup design and techno-economic assessments. Another topic Ian is passionate about is nutrient pollution, which has cascading effects on our local aquatic ecosystems, as well as air quality and climate change. To address this global challenge, he is developing novel controlled release fertilisers by coating them with PHA and other bioplastics to help mitigate nutrient losses from agricultural lands and reducing fertiliser requirements. Ian is a motivated problem-solver, applying fundamental chemical engineering principles to help support a transition to a more sustainable future.

Scaling-up fermentation processes is not straightforward due to the emergence of concentration gradients at scale. For gas fermentation processes, with CO2, CO and CH4 and H2, scaling is even more challenging as high mass transfer rates need to be obtained. In his work, Lars is developing a framework to reliably scale-up gas fermentation processes, considering both mass transfer and concentration gradients. We aim to employ mechanistic models, combined with wet-lab data, to develop relationships and fluid dynamic (CFD) models to estimate the fermentation performance at industrial scale. He specialised in topics like bioreactor and bioprocess design, bioprocess scale-up/scale-down, mass transfer and transport phenomena, metabolic and kinetic modelling and simulation techniques.