Professor Zhiguo Yuan is the Director of the Advanced Water Management Centre. After completing a PhD in aeronautical engineering, Zhiguo shifted his research direction to wastewater management. His research focuses on development of innovative solutions for urban water management through effective integration of fundamental science and applied engineering. He has won over $30M in competitive research funding since 2001 including 20 ARC Discovery and Linkage grants as a Chief Investigator. Prof Yuan is an Executive of the $117m Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities and Leader of the Future Technologies Program.

He has to date published nearly 300 fully refereed journal papers including a paper in Nature (2013) and Science (2014). His h-index is 53 (Scopus, July 2015), with over 9000 citations. He is the founder of three biotechnology businesses namely SeweX, Cloevis and Lodomat, and his research has delivered documented savings of over $400 million to the Australian water industry. His research achievements and leadership have been recognized through national and international awards with the most recent being the 2015 ATSE Clunies Award and the International Water Association (IWA) 2014 Global Project Innovation Award (Applied Research Category) – as Project Leader. Prof Yuan is an IWA Fellow and was named as one of Engineers Australia’s Top 100 Most Influential Engineers for 2015. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE).

Researcher biography

Prof Yuan received his PhD degree in aeronautical engineering in 1992 from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China. He changed research direction to wastewater management in 1994, when he took up a postdoctoral research fellow position at Ghent University, Belgium. He joined the Advanced Water Management Centre (AWMC), renamed as the Australian Centre for Water and Environmental Biotechnology in July 2021, at The University of Queensland in 1998. He served as the AWMC Deputy Director 2001-2014, and then the AWMC/ACWEB Director in 2015 to July 2022. His research focuses on development of innovative solutions for urban water management and environmental biotechnology through effective integration of fundamental science and applied engineering. He won over $50M in government, industry and university research funding including many ARC Discovery, Linkage and Fellowship grants, mostly as the lead Chief Investigator. Prof Yuan was one of the founding members of the $117m Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities. He has published intensively both in specialised journals such as Water Research and Environmental Science and Technology, and multidisciplinary journals including Nature and Science. He is the founder of three biotechnology businesses namely SeweX, Cloevis and Lodomat, and his research has delivered documented savings of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Australian water industry. His research achievements and leadership have been recognized through major national and international awards including the 2015 ATSE Clunies Ross Award and the International Water Association (IWA) 2014 Global Project Innovation Award (Applied Research Category). Prof Yuan was named as one of Engineers Australia's Top 100 Most Influential Engineers for 2015. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE), an IWA Distinguished Fellow, and was awarded the highly prestigious ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship in 2017. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in January 2019.