Dr.-Ing. Harald Anlauf was till March 2020 Academic Director at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute of Mechanical Process Engineering and Mechanics and since more than 40 years active in the field of solid liquid separation technology. He earned his academic degrees as Chemical Engineer 1980 and 1985 at Karlsruhe University. 1999-2006 he was Chairman of the VDI-GVC working party „Mechanical Liquid Separation“, since 2000 Co-Chairman of the FILTECH Congress Scientific Committee. 2004-2008 he was Chairman of INDEFI and President of the 10th World Filtration Congress 2008 in Leipzig, Germany. He published more than 190 technical papers, books etc. and is internationally active in giving consultations and lectures.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Eberhard Schmidt is Full Professor for Safety Engineering / Environmental Protection at Wuppertal University. His academic degrees he earned 1991 and 1998 at Karlsruhe University. From 1993 to 1994 he was affiliated with the Joint Research Centre in Ispra/Italy. In the years 1998 and 1999 he was with Degussa company in the department of process engineering / particle technology. He is Co-Chairman of the FILTECH Conference and was Scientific Secretary of 10th World Filtration Congress. He has published more than 100 technical papers, books, patents, etc. and consulted and lectured throughout the world.

Dr Anthony Stickland is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering at The University of Melbourne. His research is focussed on the rheology and solid-liquid separation of particulate suspensions. Current areas of research involve solid-liquid separation processes in a wide range of industries including mineral processing, water treatment, waste-water treatment and bio-sludges. Work is continuing on the development and validation of experimental characterisation methods and modelling tools for sedimentation, thickening, filtration, centrifugation, drying and evaporation applications. An important strategic goal is to incorporate shear effects into characterisation methods and dewatering models, thereby enabling optimisation of complex dewatering processes that involve combined shear and compressional loads such as cross-flow filtration, raked thickening, decanting centrifugation and thin film drying.

Prof. Gernot Krammer is affiliated with the Institute of Process and Particle Engineering at Graz, University of Technology (TUG), Austria, where he supervises the Mechanical Process Engineering research group. For more than 25 years, he has been lecturing in the fields of process engineering, combustion, particle and environmental technology at bachelor, master and doctoral level at the TUG, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, and Brown University, Providence, RI, US. Before rejoining TUG in 2016, he directed the global research and development activities of the Separation division of the company Andritz AG for almost 10 years. His research interests include the filtration of particles from fluids (liquid and gas) and heterogeneous/catalytic reaction systems with applications in gas cleaning and energy conversion. He has authored or co-authored approx. 200 peer reviewed articles, and he holds several commercially utilized patents. Dr. Krammer serves as a referee for numerous scientific journals, a panelist for different science and research foundations, and an appointed member of the Gas Cleaning Section of the German Chemical Society.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Markus Lehner is Full Professor for Process Engineering and Environmental Protection at Montanuniversität Leoben, Austria. He earned his academic degrees at Technical University of Munich in 1992 and 1996. Form 1999 – 2010 he has been area manager for sales, engineering and construction with RVT Process Equipment GmbH (previously Rauschert Verfahrenstechnik GmbH), Steinwiesen, Germany. His current fields of activity are energy process engineering, thermal cracking, catalytic processes for CO2-utilisation, Power-to-Gas and gas cleaning (mainly absorption).

Dr. Christine Sun was the Chair of American Filtration and Separation Society (AFS). She os head of the Waterloo Filtration Institute and is President of Filtration Technology International (FTI). She is a globally well-known technical and market expert in nonwoven and filtration industry. With 30 years of experiences in both academic and industrial services, she has not only broad and in-depth knowledge, but also commercial scale hands-on experience on product development. She has over 100 technical publications and patents in the related area.

Prof. Dr. Liang-Yin CHU is a Distinguished Professor of Chang Jiang Scholars Program of Chemical Engineering and a Vice President of Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. He became the Director of Sichuan Provincial Key Laboratory for Filtration and Separation in 2001. He was a research fellow at the University of Tokyo (1999-2001) and a visiting scholar at Harvard University (2006-2007), ESPCI ParisTech (2007-2008) and the University of Birmingham (2011). He has authored and co-authored more than 400 articles, 50 patents, 6 books and 16 book chapters. He has received many honors and awards including Natural Science Award issued by the Ministry of Education (2003) and Sichuan Provincial Government (2015), Distinguished Young Scholar issued by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (2008), Distinguished Professor of “Chang Jiang Scholars Program” issued by the Ministry of Education (2009) , Te-Pang Hou Chemical Science and Technology Innovation Award issued by the Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China (2013), Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (2014), and National Technological Invention Award (2018). His teaching and research are focused on filtration and separation technologies, smart membranes, advanced functional materials, and microfluidics.

Professor Antti Häkkinen holds a professorship in solid/liquid separation at LUT University (Finland) and heads a group of 10 researchers from doctoral students to post-doctoral researchers. Professor Häkkinen has worked on various issues related to solid/liquid separation and characteristics of filter materials and particulate materials for over 20 years. He is an expert in filtration of mineral concentrates, tailings and biomaterials and has extensive experience in combining various chemical engineering phenomena, e.g. crystallization, classification, dissolution and chemical reactions, and empirical modelling with solid/liquid separation. The research group is in its field the only academic research group operating in Finland and is well networked internationally.
Professor Häkkinen has authored more than 80 publications in international peer reviewed journals and has presented over 100 papers at international scientific conferences. He has been the chairman of the Nordic Filtration Society (2009 – 2010 & 2014 - 2015) and was a council member of The Filtration Society (UK) from 2010 until 2014. He is a regular reviewer to several international journals and conferences in the field of separation technology, mining and metallurgical engineering.

Pierre-Yves Pontalier has a scientific background in food engineering. He obtained a PhD on the modeling of the nanofiltration separation mechanisms, applied to whey fractionation. He has been a Professor in Process Engineering at the Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse since 1998. He has been working for 30 years in the field of separation processes, with a particular focus on liquid/solid separation membrane and chromatographic processes. He is the author of 50 peer-reviewed papers, 3 patents and 4 book chapters in the field of liquid/solid separation. He has been a member of French Society in Fluid Solid Separation (SF2P) since 2010 and chair since 2019. He participates to the organization of FPS and FrancoFilt congresses.

Prof. Sergiy Antonyuk is full professor and director of the Institute of Particle Technology at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany. He studied Process Equipment and Engineering at the Donetsk National Technical University in Ukraine. In 2004 he obtained his first PhD in ecological safety at the National Technical University Kyiv. In 2006 he received his second PhD in Process Engineering at the University of Magdeburg (Germany) and continued his research in particle technology during postdoctoral period in the group of Prof. Jürgen Tomas. In 2008 he moved to Hamburg University of Technology to work as Assistant Professor in the Institute of Solids Process Engineering and Particle Technology (Prof. Stefan Heinrich). Since 2014 he is full professor at the TU Kaiserslautern. His research covers filtration and separation processes in the liquid and air, contact mechanics and breakage dynamics of the particles and agglomerates, flow behavior of powders, surface functionalization, and simulation of multiphase flow using Discrete Element Method, Computational Fluid Dynamics and other numerical methods.

Achim Dittler is full Professor at the Institute of Mechanical Process Engineering and Mechanics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He serves as Head of the Gas-Particle-Systems (GPS) group. The group does research in Chemical Engineering, Automotive Engineering, Environmental & Mechanical Engineering with the focus on gas-particle-systems. Gas-phase particle & droplet generation, characterization and separation represent the core competences of the research group.

Dr.-Ing. Martin J. Lehmann is Principal Expert Research Network and Public Funding at MANN+HUMMEL. Before he served four years as Vice President Air Filtration and Engineering Air Filter Elements at MANN+HUMMEL GmbH. In this assignment Dr. Lehmann has been responsible for the strategic orientation of air filtration as well as for the global R&D of air filter elements in the transportation segment. From 1998 until 2003, he worked in Prof. Kasper’s research group at University Karlsruhe and earned his doctoral degree in 2005 on modeling loading kinetics and 3D MRI visualization of single fibers in air filters. In 2004, Martin Lehmann joined Cummins Filtration at Stoughton, Wisc. From 2006 until 2016, he advanced and set milestones with his simulation team for filtration at MANN+HUMMEL, Ludwigsburg, regarding simulation of filter media and elements. Dr. Lehmann is a member of the Scientific Committee of the FILTECH, the American Filtration and Separation Society, WFC13. He is appointed member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the GSaME at Uni Stuttgart and elected board member of the AFS (2020-2022). He was co-chair of several AFS conferences and is co-chairing the 2021 AFS conference. Dr. Lehmann was an invited keynote speaker at InterPore, AFS and FILTECH and has published over 80 technical papers.

Prof. Dr. J. Niessner is a research professor for fluid mechanics at Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences, member of the Promotionsverband BW and director of the Institute for Flow in Additively Manufactured Structures (ISAPS). She received her doctorate and habilitation in the field of modeling and simulation of multiphase flows in porous media and did research at the University of Stuttgart, the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, Rocquencourt, in France, the University of Bergen in Norway and Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research covers both numerical modeling and simulation as well as and experimental investigation of aerosol particle transport and filtration, coalescense filtration, transport and separation of fibrous particles from solids and topology optimization of filter structures as a basis for 3d printing. Niessner received several awards for her research, e.g. the SIAG / GS Junior Scientist Prize of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Science Prize for outstanding application-oriented research of the Thomas Gessmann Foundation or the Sigrid and Viktor Dulger Prize of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hermann Nirschl is Professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) for Mechanical Process Engineering. His work is focused on particle technology where filtration, centrifugation and mixing processes are major topics. Besides the development of new process technologies, modeling and simulation (CFD, DEM, CFD-DEM, Lattice Boltzman Methods) are of special interest for his research. Also the particle characterization with scattering and imaging technologies deliver important information for the digitalisation of process technologies. Prof. Nirschl published numerous papers on the mentioned research fields and is active on different national and international organisations.

Dr. A. Mukhopadhyay is Professor in the Department of Textile Technology at National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar (India). His academic and research experience span over 24 years with 2 years of industrial experience. His field of interest is quite diversified and interdisciplinary inclusive of a wide range of filtration science and technology. More recently he has focused strongly on a detailed examination of the behavior of fabrics and fabric filter pollution control equipment. His work includes studies of filtration performance as a function of different fabric construction and types, laminated surfaces and surface finishes, stresses such as higher temperatures, abrasion and dust loading and filter bag construction. He has contributed more than 170 research publications in reputed academic and applied journals, conference proceedings etc. Publication also includes 10 monographs/book chapters encompassing different areas of technical textiles.

Professor Bhaskar N. Thorat has been a teacher, researcher, consultant and a policy maker for last 3 decades, starting his professional career at National Chemical Laboratory, a premier CSIR Laboratory, Pune (from 1989 to 1994), moving on to Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT), Mumbai (from 1994 to 2018) and thenceforth taking reigns as The Director, ICT-IOC Odisha Campus, Bhubaneswar till date. He is one of the most sought-after Chemical Engineer when it comes to innovation and research in sustainable technology development. He is an Accredited Environment Impact Assessor, approved by National Accreditation Board for Education and Training (NABET), Quality Council of India.
He initiated the World Forum for Crystallization, Filtration and Drying in the year 2006. With an entrepreneurial mindset, he and his research students have several start-ups. Professor Thorat has in his achievements, several international award including three Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s top prize of USD 3,00,000, Michael Dell’s Social Innovation Award of USD 60,000, two Millennium Alliance Award of 2 million USD. He has also been associated with the Govt. of Odisha in the Expert group of Doctors and Scientists to advice Government on various aspects related to COVID-19 in the state. Professor Thorat possess few additional traits such as techno-entrepreneur, an avid reader of sociology and economics.

Paolo Tronville is an Associate Professor at Politecnico di Torino, the engineering school in Turin, Italy. He has been involved for 25 years in the application of computational fluid dynamics to air filter design and in the development of test methods for air filter elements. He has published papers in both European and American technical and scientific journals and has given seminars in several countries on air cleaning equipment performance and its energy implications.
Prof. Tronville was the Chairman of International Standards Organization Technical Committee 142 “Cleaning equipment for air and other gases” from 2005 to 2016. He has been the Chairman of CEN/TC195 “Air filters for general air cleaning” since 2006 and he is an expert to several standardization working groups.
Prof. Tronville is a member of AAAR, AFS, ASHRAE, GAeF and a voting member of some technical and standard project committees on air filtration. He is an ASHRAE Fellow, Distinguished Lecturer and member of the Research Administration Committee.

Prof. Kunihiro Fukui is professor of Chemical Engineering Program, Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University, Japan. He received his doctoral degree in Chemical Engineering at Kyoto University in 1998. He had been assistant professor from 1996 to 2005, associate professor from 2005 to 2011 at Hiroshima University for Chemical Engineering. His main research fields are size classification, dust collection by bag-filter, and recycling of particulate waste.
He is Vice-President of the Society of Powder Technology, Japan (SPTJ) since 2019, and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of the Society of Powder Technology, Japan since 2017. He is also a member of Editors of Advanced Powder Technology. He received several awards including Journal of Chemical Engineering of Japan (JCEJ) Outstanding Paper Award of 2017, and SPTJ Best Paper Award of 2008.

Prof. Emeritus Eiji Iritani is professor emeritus at Nagoya University, Japan, since 2019. He received his doctoral degree in Chemical Engineering at Nagoya University in 1981. He had been assistant professor from 1981 to 1991, associate professor from 1991 to 1999 and professor from 1999 to 2019 at Nagoya University for Chemical Engineering.

His research covers compressible cake filtration, membrane pore blocking, and dewatering due to expression. He has published more than 190 refereed papers, one book, and more than 50 book chapters.

He is President of The Filtration Society Japan Association (FSJA) since 2001. He is a member of INDEFI since 2014. He was Program Chairman of Asian Pacific Confederation of Chemical Engineering (APCChE) 2004 Congress. He was a member of the executive board of The Society of Chemical Engineers, Japan (SCEJ) from 2011 to 2013. He received several awards including The SCEJ Award (2017), The SCEJ Award for Outstanding Research Achievement (2010), and The Global 100 Eco-Tech Awards in Expo 2005, Japan.

Dr. Kyung-Ju Choi received MS and Ph.D. in Polymer Engineering at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is currently CTO of Clean and Science, Rolling Meadows, IL. He was an adjunct professor of Chemical Engineering in the University of Louisville from 1996 to 2011, and in the Tennessee Tech University from 1986 to 1995. He was with AAF (American Air Filter) International as Director of Global Media Development from 1995 to 2009, and Sr. Staff Scientist with Cummins Filtration from 1986 to 1995.

Leon Gradoń has a diploma in chemical engineering from Warsaw University of Technology (WUT) in 1969, diploma in mathematics from Warsaw University in 1975 and PhD from WUT in 1976. He was a postdoc at University of Houston, 1978-1979. He has been professor at the WUT until 2019. Since that he has a status of emeritus professor. His main field of the research is filtration, polymer processing, transport processes in human respiratory system and particle technology.
Leon Gradoń is author and co-author of 21 monographs and chapters, 7 academic books, over 230 per-reviewed papers in scientific international journals, over 250 presentations on International Conferences and author and co-author of 65 patents and utility models. He is also author of several filtration technologies introduced into a world market.

Prof. Andrzej Krasiński holds Ph.D. in chemical engineering obtained in 2005 at Faculty of Chemical and Process Engineering of Warsaw University of Technology, and in 2018 the D.Sc. (habilitation) for a comprehensive research on emulsion separation using the coalescence filtration method. Currently he has been employed as Associate Professor at afore mentioned faculty, in Chair of Integrated Processes Engineering (initially in Process Equipment Department). Prof. Andrzej Krasiński is a co-author of more than 40 publications in peer reviewed journals, over 30 conference presentations, and 2 patents. He is an expert of National Center for Research and Development, and past member of IChemE, where he obtained the Chartered Engineer (CEng) status. His research track is related to the separation processes, with focus on the droplets coalescence and separation of gas-liquid and liquid-liquid dispersions, pervaporation and gas cleaning techniques. He has been involved in numerous industrially oriented projects including pyrolysis of wastes, development of filtration products for the automotive industry and for the ammonia plant. Based on past experience his area of expertise covers also aggregation of particles in turbulent.

Dr. Wu Chen is a Principal Research Scientist at Dow. He has over 30 years of industrial experience in solid/liquid separation and air/gas filtration, on both technologies and filtration markets. He also has expertise in project management, process design, and plant startup. He has been teaching this course in numerous organizations and countries for over 25 years. He is currently the chair of AFS Education Committee and the coordinator of AFS short courses. He has served as the chair of AFS, board of directors, conference chairs, local chapter officers and various committee members. His was awarded AFS Frank Tiller Award for outstanding technical achievements, AFS Well Shoemaker Award for leadership and service to the filtration industry and Fellow Member Award for sustained significant contributions to filtration technologies and filtration industry.

In 2021 Dr. Karsten Keller started as Sr. Director for Innovation at Santa Cruz Nutritionals in California. He is leading a group in transformative innovation of healthy new food applications. Between 2017 and 2021 he was Director Technology Innovation & Improvement Management at Nitto Denko Avecia Inc. He was responsible for new technology introduction and continuous improvements in Avecia’s Oligonucleotide production. He led a global team for new Pharma production.
Karsten has been 19 years with DuPont in the Corporate Science & Innovation department and was responsible for open innovation and university relations globally. He was working to match science needs of DuPont with outside opportunities from universities, national labs and start-ups. He worked in all areas of Life Science.
Previously, he was Associate Director, R&D Engineering, at the DuPont Nutrition & Health business. He has research leadership experience across a broad platform to innovate process technologies, ranging from nonwovens and particle technology to separation and advanced modeling.
In 2022 Karsten was elected to Vice Chairman of the German Division of Mechanical Liquid Separation. He is the recipient of the DuPont Sustainability Award and is an Engineering Fellow of the Nutrition & Health business. He is the inventor of over 10 patents and has published more than 100 scientific articles. Dr. Keller was the Frank Tiller Award winner in 2005, recognized for leadership in engineering and education. He has acted as advisor to Ph.D. candidates at MIT. He is currently a process innovation adjunct professor at University Freiberg, Germany. Before joining DuPont he led his own engineering consulting company for six years. Dr. Keller received his doctorate in chemical engineering from University of Karlsruhe, Germany.