Huu Hao Ngo,University of Technology Sydney

Huu Hao Ngo is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). He serves as the Deputy Director of the Centre for Technology in Water and Wastewater and Co-Director of the Joint Research Centre for Environmental Green Biotechnology. His primary research areas include biowaste/wastewater treatment processes, bioenergy, resource recovery and reuse, membrane technology, and environmental impact assessment. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Bioresource Technology and Chemical Engineering Journal, Associate Editor of Science of the Total Environment and Journal of Water Process Engineering, and serves as an editorial board member or guest editor for numerous internationally renowned journals.

Theo Huisman earned his master's degree in Environmental Engineering from ETH Zurich, where he collaborated with Eawag and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on various membrane filtration systems. He later completed his PhD at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in the Center for Desalination and Reuse, under the supervision of Professor Johannes Vrouwenvelder.

He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the research group of Professor Peter Desmond at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in Qatar. His research focuses on biofilm formation and biofouling in membrane filtration and water transport systems. 

Zhao Li is a doctoral candidate in the Biofilm Engineering Research Group at the Institute for Environmental Engineering (ISA), RWTH Aachen University, Germany. His research focuses on the management of organic carbon transport during wastewater reclamation using reverse osmosis membranes. He specializes in advanced membrane filtration technologies and biofilm monitoring, which are critical for optimizing water reuse processes.

Zhao Li holds a master's degree in Civil Engineering from RWTH Aachen University, with a specialization in water management and reuse. His first paper, published in Desalination, investigates how dissolved organic carbon leaching from commercial reverse osmosis membranes affects the removal of organic solutes.

Shengjie Li is a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany. She obtained his bachelor's degree in Environmental Science from Shandong University in 2017 and her doctoral degree in Environmental Engineering from Peking University in 2022. During her PhD studies, she conducted an academic exchange at the University of Calgary from 2020 to 2021.

Her research focuses on:

Microbial nitrogen cycling in aquatic environments,

Microbial communities attached to marine single particles,

Microbial responses to environmental changes.

She has published 19 SCI papers, including 11 first-author papers in leading journals such as The ISME Journal, Water Research, Environmental Microbiology, and Environment International.

Cheng Shi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag). His research focuses on the chemical characterization of the impacts of environmental disturbances on geochemical and microbial processes within ecosystems. He employs statistical and machine learning methods to extract environmental signals from untargeted analysis data of environmental samples and to predict sources and trends of environmental stressors.

He earned his PhD from Oregon State University in 2024. His research findings have been published in journals such as Environmental Science & Technology.

Dr. Chujin Ruan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag). His primary research focuses on the assembly and evolution of surface microbial communities, microbial interactions and their ecological significance, and the functions and regulatory mechanisms of microbial communities. Dr. Ruan has published academic papers as the first author in journals such as Nature Communications, Current Biology, npj Biofilms and Microbiomes, and ISME Communications. He has received special funding support from the China Scholarship Council (CSC) for his studies and postdoctoral research. He also serves as a youth editorial board member for Acta Pedologica Sinica and as a reviewer for journals such as The ISME Journal.

Yaochun Yu is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Chemistry at Eawag. He earned his bachelor's degree in Hydrology and Water Resources from Jilin University in 2015, and his master's and doctoral degrees in Environmental Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2017 and 2021, respectively. During his PhD studies (2019–2021), he served as a visiting project scientist at the University of California, Riverside.

His research focuses on the environmental transport and transformation of emerging organic contaminants, particularly organofluorine compounds. He also investigates the microbial transformation products and pathways of contaminants, as well as the characterization of microbial communities, functional microorganisms, functional genes, and functional enzymes.

Dr. Bijing Xiong holds a PhD in Biochemistry and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich. She is a recipient of the prestigious ETH Postdoctoral Fellowship (2023–2025). Dr. Xiong earned his bachelor's degree from Yunnan University (School of Life Sciences) in 2013, her master's degree in Environmental Science from the Institute of Urban Environment in 2017, and her PhD in Biochemistry from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany in 2022. During her doctoral studies, he was awarded a DAAD Fellowship and conducted research at the University of Pau in France.

Her research focuses on the development of microfluidic systems for single-cell regulation, the evolution of antibiotic resistance at the single-cell level, and the impact of microbial interactions on the antibiotic resistance of pathogens.

Yang Liu, obtained his bachelor's degree from Ocean University of China in 2012, his master's degree from National Taiwan University in 2015, and his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 2021. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Molecular Biology Laboratory, University of Cambridge. His main research focuses on developing advanced characterization methods and high-throughput directed evolution systems to optimize gene editing tools. He has published several academic papers as the first or corresponding author in journals such as Nature Communications.

Zhugen Yang holds a PhD from the University of Lyon, France, and is currently a Professor and doctoral supervisor at Cranfield University, UK, where he serves as the Director of the Advanced Sensors Laboratory. In 2018, he received the prestigious UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship (with a success rate typically below 1%), establishing the Laboratory for Sensor Technology and Environmental Health and initiating independent research as a group leader. In 2023, he was awarded the Leverhulme Research Leadership Award. 

His primary research focuses on advanced sensing technologies, including paper-based microfluidics and rapid on-site sensor applications in environmental science (e.g., microbial contamination in drinking water, wastewater analysis), public health (e.g., rapid drug detection), and biomedicine (e.g., rapid diagnostics for cancer and infectious diseases). 

He has led or participated in over 20 projects funded by organizations such as the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Scottish Funding Council, and the EU Marie Curie Fellowship program. He has published more than 80 papers in prestigious journals, including Nature Water, PNAS, Nature Communications, and Environmental Science & Technology (ES&T).