Zhen Fang is a Professor and Leader of the Biomass Group at Nanjing Agricultural University. He is the inventor of the “fast hydrolysis” process, the elected fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. Professor Fang specializes in thermal/biochemical conversion of biomass, nanocatalyst synthesis and their applications, pretreatment of biomass for biorefineries, and supercritical fluid processes. He holds Ph.D.s from China Agricultural University and McGill University. Professor Fang is Associate Editor of the international journals, Biotechnology for Biofuels and Journal of Supercritical Fluids (2018-2020). He has more than 20 years of research experience in the field of renewable energy and green technologies at top universities and institutes around the globe, including one year in Spain (University of Zaragoza), three years in Japan (Biomass Technology Research Center, AIST; Tohoku University), and more than eight years in Canada (McGill) in renewable energy and greentechnologies. Richard L. Smith, Jr. is a Professor in the Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Tohoku University, Japan. He has a strong background in physical properties and separations and holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA). His research focuses on developing green chemical processes, especially those that use water and carbon dioxide as the solvents in their supercritical state. He is an expert on physical property measurements and separation techniques with ionic liquids, and has published more than 300 scientific papers, patents and reports in the field of chemical engineering. Professor Smith is the Asia regional editor for the Journal of Supercritical Fluids and has served on the editorial boards of major international journals. Lujiang Xu is an Associate Professor in the Biomass Group at Nanjing Agricultural University, College of Engineering. He holds a Ph.D. in Renewable and Clean Energy from the Department of Chemistry of University of Science and Technology of China and a B.S. in Light Chemical Engineering from Nanjing Forestry University. His research focuses on the selective thermo-chemical conversion of biomass and derived compounds into value-added chemicals and liquid fuels.
