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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.

Prof. Anand Veeraragavan's research interests are in supersonic combustion of hydrocarbons, hypersonic aerothermodynamics, advanced optical diagnostics for hypersonic flows and microcombustion based portable power. He is the Co-Director for UQ's Centre for Hypersonics. Since 2021, he is an Associate Editor for the AIAA Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, which is a Quartile 1 Journal in Aerospace Engineering (Scimago).

Prof. Anand Veeraragavan joined the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering as a mechanical engineering lecturer in 2012. He was an Mid-Career Advance Queensland Research Fellow (2017-2020) awarded for conducting research in the project entitled

Supersonic Combustion of Hydrocarbon Fuels for High-Mach-Number Axisymmetric Scramjets

Anand graduated with a B.Tech in aerospace engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-Madras) in 2002. He obtained his MS (2006) and PhD (2009) degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland. His Doctoral research, which focused on understanding flame stabilization in microscale combustors, won the best thesis award in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Maryland.

After his PhD, he took up a research appointment as a postdoctoral research associate in the Device Research Lab at MIT where he worked on thermophotovoltaics and nanofluid based volumetric solar absorbers. He next joined GE Energy as a combustion technologist in the US. At GE, he worked primarily on designing the next generation, land based, heavy duty, gas turbine engine combustors focusing on cost, operability, reliability and emissions and also completed his lean Six Sigma Greenbelt certification at GE.

He is currently undertaking world-leading research in the field of hypersonics and supersonic combustion sponsored by Australian DST, U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and U.S. Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development (AOARD). This includes leading the Australian effort in prestigious projects such as ground testing and simulations in support of the Boundary Layer Transition/Turbulence (BOLT II) flight test sponsored by the AFOSR.

His research interests include:

• Supersonic combustion of hydrocarbon fuels
• Hypersonic aerothermodynamics
• Optical diagnostics: PLIF for supersonic combustion, FLDI for hypersonic aerothermodynamics, high-speed schlieren
• Micro-combustion driven power systems
• Solar thermal and solar photovoltaic technology development

I have a multidisciplinary background in chemical and civil engineering, chemistry and materials science. Currently, I am the UQ leader of the National Centre for Timber Durability and Design Life, based at USC. I apply my expertise to understand the effects of fungal decay and moisture intrusion in timber connections, as well as the improvement of the fire performance of timber. I supervise 6 PhD students.