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Lisa Bai is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Australian Centre for Water and Environmental Biotechnology at the University of Queensland, where she is involved in a range of research projects on process development for sustaibale waste and wastewater management. Her main research focus is resource recoverying from waste and wastewater for the production of bioenergy sources and value-added materials such as biodegradable plastics.

Dr. Bai obtained her Bachelor Degree in Bioengineering in Central South University, China and a PhD degree in the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of Queensland. Both her bachelor and PhD thesises were focusing on open culture microalgae mass production as well as product, nutrients and energy recovery from the biomass. Before joining ACWEB, Lisa worked in an environmental service company in North Queensland (Townsville - Bowen) for four years, focusing on process design and development for the aquaculture water bioremediation using macroalgae technologies and utilising waste streams as feedstocks for the production of biomass for a diverse usage including aquaculture feed, fertiliser, and other bioactive compound.

Dr. Anthony Halog: A Pioneer in Sustainable Systems and Circular Economy

Dr. Anthony Halog is a leading authority in sustainable systems engineering and circular economy, with over 22 years of post-PhD experience in academia and research. His work focuses on integrating life cycle assessment (LCA), systems thinking, and industrial ecology to advance global sustainability efforts. Dr. Halog has successfully led numerous research projects in industrial ecology and sustainable supply chain management, contributing significantly to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) and Planetary Boundaries frameworks.

His prolific career includes over 125 publications that have been widely cited and referenced in policy documents by international bodies such as the United Nations and the European Union. With a strong commitment to mentoring, Dr. Halog has guided numerous PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers, fostering the next generation of sustainability experts. Since completing his PhD, he has examined numerous theses from various universities in Australia, North America, Africa, and Asia. His experience also extends to reviewing several grant proposals for prestigious funding bodies, including the National Science Foundation in the USA and European funding schemes.

Dr. Anthony Halog has received numerous fellowships and awards throughout his career. Notably, he was awarded fellowships from prestigious institutions such as the OECD, DAAD, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). He has held visiting fellowships across the globe, including in the UK, Germany, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, focusing on areas like Circular Economy, Green Hydrogen Policy, and Life Cycle Assessment. Dr. Halog's accolades also include early career fellowships from NSERC (Canada) and JSPS, along with several international research grants and academic scholarships, reflecting his global recognition in sustainability science and engineering.

Key areas of expertise include circular economy, bioeconomy, LCA, sustainable supply chain management, and the application of operations research and optimization in engineering sustainable systems. Dr. Halog’s interdisciplinary approach and international collaborations have positioned him as a thought leader in transitioning to a low-carbon, circular economy.

Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Chemical Engineering and a member of the Pyrometallurgy Innovation Centre led by Prof. Evgueni Jak.

He graduated with a Master in Chemistry (chemical thermodynamics) from Lomonosov's Moscow State University, Deparment of Chemistry in 2012. His Master's Thesis was "Thermodynamic optimization of the NaOH-Al(OH)3-Na2SiO3-H2O system for applications in Bayer's process of bauxite treatment" as part of a bigger project initiated in collaboration with Rusal company aimed at utilisation/valorisation of red mud residues accumulated during the production of aluminium oxide from bauxite ores.

In 2019, he completed a PhD in Metallurgical Engineering at Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal, Canada within The Centre For Research in Computational Thermodynamics (CRCT), where he acquired expertise in FactSage software, multicomponent database development, and was included in the list of official collaborators of FactSage. His PhD thesis was "Thermodynamic optimization of the Na2O-K2O-Al2O3-CaO-MgO-B2O3-SiO2 system" sponsored by Glass Consortium including Corning and SCHOTT glass producers. The purpose of the database he developed was to assist the industry in designing new glasses with special properties: chemically hardened glasses (smartphones), technical glasses with high thermal and chemical resilience (boron-containing glasses), chemically inert glasses, etc.

Short after receiving his PhD, Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev accepted a position at The University of Queensland as part of the Pyrometallurgy Innovation Centre's team where he has an official title of Theme Leader in Thermodynamic Computations, combining his broad expertise in metallurgy, chemical engineering, applied mathematics, and programming.

Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev has always been passionate about formalisation and automation of big research tasks. He started working on developing an automated solver for thermodynamic optimisation during his PhD thesis which was improved and finalised using the ideas of Prof. Evgueni Jak about real-time derivative matrix optimization and sensitivity analysis applicable to large multicomponent systems. His contribution to the Centre allowed to make transition to a continuous optimization approach when experimental and modelling streams of work in the Centre are efficiently combined together. It allows to include the most recent experimental datasets into a self-consistent database update with minimal time delays.

Dr. Zhe Yang currently is an ARC DECRA fellow in the School of Chemical Engineering/Dow Centre for Sustainable Engineering Innovation at the University of Queensland. He obtained his PhD degree in Environmental Engineering in 2018 at the University of Hong Kong (PhD supervisor: Prof. Chuyang Tang). He was appointed as research assistant/post-doc fellow in HKU from Nov 2018 to July 2021 and was further promoted to Research Assistant Professor from July 2021 to Dec 2023. He was recognized as a Top 1% Scholar worldwide ranked by Clarivate Analytics by citations in 2023. Dr. Yang has more than 10 years of R&D experience in membrane technology in the context of desalination, water reuse, and water/wastewater treatment. To date, he has published over 70 papers and two book chapters, with total citations of over 6,000 and an h-index of 41 based on Google Scholar. Most of these papers (90%) are published in Nature indexed/top tier journals in the field of environmental engineering and membrane technology, including Nature Communications, Nano Letters, Chemical Society Reviews, Environmental Science & Technology, Environmental Science & Technology Letters, Water Research, and Journal of Membrane Science. He has been awarded numerous prestigious awards, including The First Prize of the Water 2023 Young Investigator Award, Early Career Stars of Separation & Purification Technology, The 2022 ACS ES&T Engineering Best Paper Award, the Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions Gold Metal in 2019, etc. He currently serves as the Early Career Editorial Board member of the leading journal in his field (Desalination, IF 9.9).

Feature works:

1. Meta-analysis and establishing upper bound of reverse osmosis and nanofiltration membranes:

2023: His work on establishing the nanofiltration upper bound framework and investigating its impact on system performance (ACS ES&T Eng., 2, 3, (2021) 377-390) was awarded the 2022 ACS ES&T Engineering Best Paper Award.

2022: Based on the upper bound framework, Dr. Yang collaborated with several international researchers/teams from KU Leuven, Yale University, and Technion to develop an open-access database of TFC desalination membranes - Open Membrane Database (OMD) (J. Membr. Sci., 641 (2021) 119927).

2019: His work on establishing the upper bound correlation between permeance and selectivity for desalination membrane (J. Membr. Sci., 590 (2019) 117297) is the first top-cited papers published in the Journal of Membrane Science in the year 2019 and among the top 1% cited according to Essential Science Indicators (ESI Highly Cited Paper).

2. High-performance gutter layer-based reverse osmosis and nanofiltration membrane:

2017-now: His works on designing high-performance novel gutter layer-based reverse osmosis and nanofiltration membranes significantly advance the water permeance of conventional membranes by an order of magnitude with simultaneously improved selectivity, which successfully surpasses the permeance-selectivity upper bound. The significance of these studies is highlighted by several ESI Highly Cited Papers (Environ. Sci. Technol., 52 (2018) 9341-9349; Environ. Sci. Technol., 53 (2019) 5301-5308; Environ. Sci. Technol., 54 (2020) 11611-11621).

3. Mechanistic investigation of nanofiller-enhanced reverse osmosis membranes:

2019-now: In the membrane community, the concept of thin-film nanocomposite (TFN) has successfully led to several commercialized products including Aquaporin-containing TFN membranes by Aquaporin A/S1 and zeolite-based TFN seawater and brackish RO membranes by LG-Chem NanoH2O®. Nevertheless, the mechanisms for membrane performance enhancement remained unclear. Dr. Yang's works on TFN membranes (Environ. Sci. Technol., 53 (2019) 5301-5308; Environ. Sci. Technol. Lett., 7 (2020) 766-772) unveiled the underlying transport mechanisms of TFN membranes based on a systematic framework of the interior and exterior channels of the embedded nanofillers.

Professional memberships

1. A member of Membrane Society of Australasia (MSA), since May 2024

2. A member of Australia Water Association (AWA), since April 2024