Plenary and Keynote Speakers

Dr. Jianbing Li
University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), Canada
Plenary Speaker

Dr. Jianbing Li is a professor and professional engineer in the School of Engineering at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), Canada. He obtained his PhD degree in environmental engineering from the University of Regina in 2003. He has research interests in environmental pollution control, petroleum waste management, environmental modeling, risk assessment, and oil spill response. He has produced more than 300 publications in international journals and conferences, with an h-index of 55 (Google Scholar). His research has been supported by many federal and provincial funding organizations. He was a semi-finalist and finalist of Canada’s Oil Spill Response Challenge (OSRC) in 2023/24 and received $1.3 million to develop an operational-scale and mobile oil/water separation system for oil spill response. His research has been recognized by various awards, such as multiple UNBC Research Excellence Awards. In 2023, Dr. Li received the Dr. Albert E. Berry Medal from Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (CSCE) to recognize his outstanding contribution to the field of environmental engineering in Canada. He provided extensive services to the professional community, such as the Research Tools and Instruments (RTI) selection committee (Civil, Industrial and Systems Engineering, 1609) of Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) (2016 – 2021), the Discovery Grant Evaluation Group (Civil, Industrial and Systems Engineering, EG1509) of NSERC (2022 to 2025), Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) Experts Panel (2023), and the Program Fit Advisor (PFA) for the Discovery Horizons (DH) Program of NSERC (2025). Since 2017, he has been serving as a member of the Academic Examiners Subcommittee of Engineers and Geoscientists British Columbia (EGBC). From 2018 to 2022, he served as the Co-Lead of the Program Area “Decanting and Oily Waste Management” of the Multi-Partner Oil Spill Research Initiative (MPRI) under Canada’s Oceans Protection Plan (OPP). He is serving as an Associate Editor or Editorial Board Member for seven international journals. He served as the inaugural Chair of the CSCE Northern British Columbia Section and served as the Chair of CSCE Cold Regions Division from 2022 to 2025. Dr. Li is a Fellow of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (FCSCE), a Fellow of the Canadian Society of Senior Engineers (FCSSE), a Fellow of Engineers Canada (FEC), and a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (FEIC).

Topic of Keynote: Petroleum Sludge Valorization via Pyrolysis: Modelling and Experimental Studies
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Dr. Borja G. Reguero
University of California Santa Cruz, USA
Keynote Speaker

Topic of Keynote:

Dr. Huichun (Judy) Zhang
Case Western Reserve University, USA
Keynote Speaker

Dr. Huichun (Judy) Zhang is the Frank H. Neff professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Case Western Reserve University. She earned her Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology and her B.S. and M.S. from Nanjing University. Her research focuses on the fate and transformation of environmental contaminants in natural and engineered aquatic environments and the removal of organic contaminants from contaminated water. Her recent research areas also include predictive modeling for contaminant reactivity and sorption using machine learning tools. Dr. Zhang has published in numerous journals, such as Chemical Reviews, Environmental Science and Technology, and Water Research. She has received seven competitive research grants from the NSF as the PI, and directed research projects for many other agencies and industry. She is an Associate Editor for ACS ES&T Water and a member of AEESP Board of Directors. She is a past recipient of Nanova/CAPEES Frontier Research Award, CAPEES Award for Environmental Application of AI/ML, and ES&T Best Paper Award, among others.

Topic of Keynote: Building Mechanistically Sound Machine Learning Models for Environmental Applications
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