Plenary Speakers
Sebastian Böcker
Sebastian Böcker holds the Chair for Bioinformatics at the Institute for Computer Science, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. He studied mathematics and did his PhD in biomathematics at Bielefeld University, focusing on theoretical phylogenetics. He then went to industry for three years, developing computational methods for the interpretation of DNA/RNA mass spectrometry data. He returned to Bielefeld University as an independent research leader, before he took up his current position in Jena. His research interests are mainly method-driven and were originally focused on combinatorics and algorithmics; later, stochastics and machine learning joined the methods of interest. On the application side, his research focuses on the annotation of small molecules from mass spectrometry data: SIRIUS, CSI: FingerID and CANOPUS from his group were named "methods to watch" by Nature Methods. Sebastian Böcker is an Emmy Noether fellow (Computer Science Action Program) of the Deutsche For schungsgemeinschaft and also a fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Society. In 2022, he and his group won the Thuringian Research prize.
Beate Escher
Beate Escher has been Head of the Department of Cell Toxicology since October 2014. She holds a professorship in Environmental Toxicology at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. She is a lecturer (Privatdozent) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in ETHZ, Switzerland. She holds a professorship at the University of Queensland and an adjunct professorship at Griffith University, Australia. She is a member of the German Council of Science and Humanities and of the board of reviewing editors at SCIENCE. Beate Escher’s research interests focus on mode-of-action-based environmental risk assessment, including methods for initial hazard screening and risk assessment of pharmaceuticals, pesticides, disinfection by-products and persistent organic pollutants with an emphasis on mixtures. A special interest is the effect assessment of transformation products and disinfection by-products. One of Escher’s goals is to close the gap between exposure and effect assessment through common approaches linking bioavailability to internal exposure and effects via understanding and modelling of toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic processes. More practically oriented aspects of her work include passive sampling and effect-based methods for water quality assessment. Further, she has an interest in improving dosing methods for very hydrophobic and volatile compounds and developing new in-vitro assays for bioaccumulation and toxicity assessment.
Guibin Jiang
Professor Jiang Guibin is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the Academy of Sciences of the Developing Countries. He graduated from the Department of Chemistry, Shandong University in January 1982, and received his master's and doctoral degrees from the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences from 1987 to 1991. From 1989 to 1991 and 1994 to 1996, he was a visiting scholar and postdoctoral researcher at the National Research Council of Canada and the University of Antwerp, Belgium, respectively.
Prof. Jiang’s research is mainly focused on analytical development, environmental fate, toxicology and health effects of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), organometallic compounds and nano-materials. As a pioneer in the field of new pollutants, his research conducted the academic direction of discovering new pollutants in real environment and played an irreplaceable role in the implementation of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Minamata Convention on Mercury in China.
He has contributed more than 1300 papers in peer-reviewed international scientific journals and published 23 monographs. He was honored with the prestigious Chang Jiang Scholars Achievement Award in 2007, National Award of Natural Science of State Council of China in 2003, 2011 and 2018, Outstanding Achievements in Environmental Science & Technology Award (American Chemical Society) in 2020, Agilent Thought Leader Award in 2013, and Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Prize of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2013.
Jennifer Stauber
Dr Jenny Stauber is an Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University, Australia. She has recently retired from CSIRO Environment, Sydney, Australia where she was a Chief Research Scientist and formerly Deputy Chief and Acting Chief of CSIRO Land and Water. Jenny is an aquatic ecotoxicologist with expertise in the bioavailability and toxicity of contaminants in marine and freshwater systems, environmental risk assessment, downstream impacts of mining, and the derivation of toxicant water and sediment quality guidelines.
Jenny has chaired and served as an expert ecotoxicologist on many World Health Organisation chemical review boards and is currently a member of the Ecotoxicity Technical Advisory Panel for the International Metals Associations. She is a member of a large number of expert advisory panels to the Australian government and industry on areas as diverse as chemical contaminants, Great Barrier Reef water quality, petroleum and mineral resources, chemicals risk assessment and water quality guidelines. She is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and a SETAC Fellow. She is a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering. She was a recipient of Australia’s Land and Water Eureka Prize in 2006 and has authored over 400 journal papers, book chapters and reports.
Hongwen Sun
Dr. Hongwen Sun is a professor and former dean of the College of Environmental Science and Engineering at Nankai University, China. She acquired her PhD at Nankai University in 1994 and has been working there till now. She worked in Osaka University, Japan as a postdoctoral researcher during 1999-2001 and in Swiss Federal Institute of Water Technology (Eawag), Switzerland as a visiting scholar in 2008. She holds the chair position of he Center on Environmental Processes and Risk Assessment of Emerging Contaminants, which is a discipline innovation and international exchange center supported by the Ministry of Education in China, and the chair position of the Innovative Team on Risk Assessment and Pollution Remediation supported by the Ministry of Science and Engineering in China. She commits herself to two research fields: the field of source, fate, and human exposure of emerging organic contaminants including perfluoroalkyl substances, plasticizers and fire retardants and the field of novel materials and technologies for the remediation of polluted soil.
She has published over 600 journal papers and several book chapters and edited one monograph of “Biochar and Environment”. The papers have been cited more than 15,000 times and she was selected as highly cited scholar by Elsevier. She was named with several talent titles by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Natural Science Foundation of China. She is currently an Advisory Board Member for the Journal of Environmental Science & Technology and serves several other internal and international journals as an editor board member. She is an executive member of the Soil Science Society of China, vice chairman of the Committee of Pollution Control of Emerging Contaminants, and member of several other academic committees.
Edward Topp
Since July 2023, Ed Topp has held the ANR/INSERM Chair of Excellence, Priority Research Program of France on Antibiotic Resistance, and Director of Research at the UMR Agroecology at the INRAE research center in Dijon. Before his arrival in France, he was a Principal research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC). He was also the scientific coordinator (2016-23) of the Federal genomics research and development initiative on antimicrobial resistance [GRDI-AMR], a key element of the Canadian federal action plan against antimicrobial resistance. He holds adjunct faculty positions in the Department of Biology at the University of Western Ontario, and at the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph. He is an environmental microbiologist and chemist and conducts research on animal and crop production practices that are protective of environmental and human health. A particular focus is the mitigation of the development and transmission of antimicrobial resistance. He is a past president of the Canadian Society for Microbiologists (2011). He was elected a member of l’academie d’agriculture de France (2016) and was appointed a Fellow of the Soil Science of America (2022).
Hiroshi Yamamoto
Hiroshi Yamamoto received an MS from the Graduate School of Global Environmental Engineering of Kyoto University in 1997 and a PhD from Environmental and Water Resource Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. He served as an assistant professor and associate professor at Tokushima University between 2004 and 2016 and moved to the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) in April 2016 and became Head of the Ecotoxicity Section in the Center for Health and Environmental Risk Research. He was promoted to Deputy Director in 2019 and became Director of the Division of Health and Environmental Risk in April 2024. His expertise is in the fate and ecological risk of micropollutants such as pharmaceuticals, pesticides, surfactants and other industrial chemicals, and more recently in plastics.
He is a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Frontier Science, The University of Tokyo. He has been contributing to international standardization of ecotoxicity testing methods and hazard assessment under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He has also been involved in environmental risk assessment of chemicals in Japan for more than 20 years mostly under the Ministry of the Environment. He has been a board member of SETAC Asia-Pacific for more than three years and became Vice President in 2022. He has also been a Vice President of SETAC Japan since 2022.
Yongguan Zhu
Professor Yongguan (Yong-Guan) Zhu, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Fellow of TWAS (The World Academy of Sciences), Fellow of the International Science Council (ISC), professor of environmental science, is the Director General of the Research Center for Eco-environmental Sciences, CAS. He has been working on environmental health and well-being related to pollution, soil biodiversity and microbial ecology. He obtained his PhD from Imperial College, London in 1998. He was a scientific committee member for the ISC program on Human Health and Well-being in Changing Urban Environment and is a member of the Committee of Science Planning of ISC. He served for nine years as a member of the Standing Advisory Group for Nuclear Application, International Atomic Energy Agency (2004-2012). He has received many merit awards, including the TWAS Award for Agricultural Science 2013, the National Natural Science Award 2009, International Union of Soil Science von Liebig Award 2022. He was selected as a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher (2016-2023) with citations over 57,000 times and an H-index of 124.
Keynotes
View a full list of other keynote lectures presenting at the meeting.