The Science and Environmental Studies Biotechnology and Allied Sciences Symposium

SESBASS 2026

Frontiers in Biotechnology

Talks and posters will focus on:

• Biomanufacturing & Environmental Biotechnology for Sustainable Development 
• Biotechnology for Water and Wastewater Treatment
• Navigating Graduate School with a Disability
• Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning in Biotechnology
• Innovations in Bio-Inspired Engineering & Materials Research

Speakers:

Biomanufacturing & Environmental Biotechnology for Sustainable Development

​Dr. Charles Chunbao Xu,  Chair Professor of Advanced Biorefinery, City University of Hong Kong, School of Energy and Environment
Advanced Biorefinery: Resource Recovery from Biomass & Organic Solid Wastes
Prof. Xu received his first PhD degree in metallurgical engineering from University of Science and Technology Beijing, China in 1998 and his 2nd PhD degree in chemical and biochemical engineering from the University of Western Ontario, Canada in 2004. After obtaining his first PhD degree, he was offered a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship from Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) to carry out postdoctoral research at Tohoku University, Japan, in 1998-2000, followed by a Research Associate appointment by Tohoku University. After obtaining his 2nd PhD degree, he spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at University of Alberta and Syncrude Canada Research Center till July 2005, when he joined Lakehead University, Canada as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in chemical engineering and was promoted quickly to a tenured Associate Professor in 2008. He moved to Western University (formerly The University of Western Ontario) to take up the NSERC/FPInnovations Industrial Research Chair in Forest Biorefinery in 2011 and became a tenured Full Professor in 2014. He served Associate Chair – Undergraduate of the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering (2016-2017) and Associate Director of Institute for Chemicals and Fuels from Alternative Resources (ICFAR) of Western University (2021-2023). He jointed City University of Hong Kong as a Chair Professor in July 2023.
 

​Dr. Hui Wei, Researcher IV-Molecular Biology, Biosciences Center, National Laboratory of the Rockies 
Scalable Bacillus subtilis, Pichia pastoris, and Zymomonas mobilis Platforms for Protein and Biomaterial Production
​Dr. Hui Wei received his Ph.D. from Queen’s University in Canada and completed postdoctoral training at Iowa State University and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is a Senior Research Scientist in the Biosciences Center at the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR). He has 18 years of experience engineering plants to overexpress enzymes and biocatalysts to improve biomass pretreatability and conversion to soluble sugars. He also has extensive experience engineering bacteria and yeast to utilize cellulosic sugars for the production of proteins, fuels, and biomaterials. Through projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO), he has advanced platforms including Bacillus subtilis for producing carbonic anhydrase enzymes to enhance concrete self-healing and to reduce CO2 to formate via enzymatic cascades; Pichia pastoris for protein production to enable cell-free biosynthesis of limonene; and Zymomonas mobilis for producing isobutanol and 2,3-butanediol. He currently works in Dr. Yannick Bomble’s group on Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI) projects developing high-throughput robotic systems for protein expression and characterization, as well as on phytomining initiatives to concentrate and extract rare earth elements from soil and wastewater.

​Dr. Sonil Nanda, Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair, Department of Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture, Dalhousie University, Truro, Nova Scotia 
Biorefinery Research Innovations and Workforce Skill Development for Canada’s Net-Zero and Sustainability Targets 
​Dr. Sonil Nanda is an Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair at the Department of Engineering in the Faculty of Agriculture at Dalhousie University, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Biology from York University, Toronto; an M.Sc. from VIT University in Tamil Nadu, India; and a B.Sc. from the Odisha University of Agriculture and Technology in Odisha, India. Dr. Nanda has more than ten years of postdoctoral research experience working at York University, Western University, and the University of Saskatchewan. Before joining Dalhousie University, he served as Director of Research and Development at Titan Clean Energy Projects Corporation in Saskatchewan. Dr. Nanda’s research areas are bioenergy, biorefining technologies, supercritical fluids, green catalysis, biochar functionalization, bioremediation, and carbon sequestration. He has ongoing collaborations with NASA on the application of hydrothermal flames for waste remediation and bioenergy conversion in space. He has authored over 176 articles in high-impact journals. He is the editor of 20 books on advanced biofuels, biochemicals, biomaterials, and circular economy published by Elsevier, American Chemical Society, Springer Nature, CRC Press, Routledge, and Apple Academic Press. He is an Editor of the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy (Elsevier), Environmental Chemistry Letters (Springer Nature), and Applied Nanoscience (Springer Nature). Dr. Nanda is ranked among the Top 2% of Scientists worldwide according to a recent Stanford University database of citation metrics.

​Dr. Dan Cudjoe, Professor at the School of Business, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology 
Power Generation from Food Waste Bio-compressed Natural Gas: Economic Feasibility
​Dr. Dan Cudjoe is a Professor at the School of Business, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology. He got a Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from the Beijing University of Technology, where he received the academic excellence award for outstanding Ph.D. students. Dr. Cudjoe has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, Beijing Institute of Technology. He sits on the editorial boards of a number of energy and environment journals and is active in research in the field of circular economy, pro-environmental behaviors, energy economics, green innovations, environmental management, and waste management. He is ranked among the World's top 2% scientists in the Environmental Sciences field by Stanford University and Elsevier. He has been named the 3rd top scholar globally in Environmental Impact Assessment for 2025 by ScholarGPS. He has been awarded high-level national research grants as the principal investigator, including the Research Fund for Excellent International Young Scientists and the Research Fund for International Young Scientists by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). Dr. Cudjoe has published over 60 papers in reputable international peer-review SCI/SSCI journals as the first or corresponding author. His research articles have been featured in several national newspapers, including the EcoWatch of Ghana. 

 Biotechnology for Water and Wastewater Treatment

​Dr. Christopher Lan, Professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Ottawa
Title TBD
Current Research Interests include membrane desiccant cooling and its applications (e.g., in personal cooling), supercritical fluid extraction with membrane technologies, membrane distillation for seawater desalination, nanofiltration, and membrane bioreactors. Also biotechnology and bioprocesses including microalgal biotechnology, novel alternatives to antibiotics, recombinant protein expression, fermentation process development, modeling and optimization and protein purification

 Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning in Biotechnology

Dr. Luis Rueda, Professor, School of Computer Science,  University of Windsor, Windsor, ON                              
Graph Machine Learning in Spatial Transcriptomics 
​Luis Rueda received his Bachelor’s degree in computer science from the National University of San Juan, Argentina, in 1993, and his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Carleton University, Canada, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. He is currently a Full Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Windsor. His current research interests are mainly focused on devising shallow and deep machine learning and representation learning algorithms at the fundamental level and applications in bioinformatics and cybersecurity to problems in biomedical imaging, transcriptomics, integrative genome-wide data analysis, identification of cancer biomarkers, user authentication, spam review detection and social engineering. Luis Rueda holds four patents on machine learning and cybersecurity and has more than 200 publications and presentations in prestigious journals and conferences in machine learning, computational biology, and cybersecurity. He has served as Associate Editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and Network Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics, and a member of the Computer Science Evaluation Group for NSERC. He is a member of the program committees of several conferences in the field. He is also a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the International Society for Computational Biology.

Students with Disabilities Navigating Graduate School

 Innovations in Bio-inspired Engineering & Materials Research