The Water Biofilms seminar series: “Granular Activated Carbon Biofilms for Biomethanation from Wastewater” by Dr Po-Heng Lee, Imperial College London

Dr Francis Hassard is a Lecturer in Public Health Microbiology at Cranfield Water Science Institute, where he provides technical leadership in potable water microbiology.

Francis has a distinct research agenda into biofiltration for drinking water treatment. He focuses on next-generation municipal water services (drinking water, wastewater, stormwater) framed around biofilms and resource recovery (i.e. water and nutrients) for improved ecohealth and living conditions; integrated with quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) to identify research gaps and management targets.

Title: Granular activated carbon biofilms for biomethanation from wastewater

Dr Po-Heng (Henry) Lee is a Senior Lecturer in Wastewater Engineering at Imperial College London.

Dr Lee’s team focuses on resource recovery and greenhouse reduction mitigation from waste streams using anaerobic biotechnologies, e.g., anaerobic sewage treatment, anaerobic digestion, fermentation, and anaerobic ammonium oxidation (Anammox). Importantly, the focus of his research and teaching has been on surpassing classical bio-energetics limitations via discrete (quantum and quantum-like) pathways (e.g., electron/proton tunnelling, hopping, gene regulation, etc.) for sustainable unprecedented wastewater management. His current interest is 1) superior antibiotics and nitrogen removal, value-added chemicals and energy production via the interactions between microbiomes and conductive materials and micro-aeration conditions and 2) full-scale wastewater plants procrastinating and optimisation using quantum machine learning. His state-of-art research techniques developed include quantum computing using IBM Qiskit (e.g., Quantum Information Theory, Variational Quantum Eigensolver), and hybrid meta-omics informatics. This enables the manipulations of microbiomes for a healthy environment.