Dr. Zhen (Jason) He is a Professor of Environmental Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to that, he was a Professor/Associate Professor at Virginia Tech and an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. He received a BS from Tongji University, a MS from Technical University of Denmark, and a PhD from Washington University in St. Louis, all in Environmental Engineering. His research focuses on technological solutions for resource recovery from wastes/wastewater. He has published over 200 journal papers and received 3 US patents. He was recognized by a Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from ASCE, Green Talent from BMBF Germany, a 2018 Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, and Dean’s Award for Research Excellence at Virginia Tech. He is Co-Editor for Journal of Hazardous Materials, a Co-Founding Editor for Journal of Hazardous Materials Letters, and Editor in Chief for Water Environment Research. In 2020, he was named a Fellow of International Water Association (IWA).

        Rapid socio-economic growth has created great challenges such as water scarcity, larger nutrient demand for increasing food production, and energy shortage. Wastewater is a key element in the water-energy-food nexus and may offer a promising solution for alleviating these challenges through innovative recovery of value-added resources. It is of great interest to transform conventional energy intensive wastewater treatment to a resource recovery process for reclaiming valuable resources such as nutrients, bioenergy derived from organic wastes, and high-quality water towards wastewater reuse. Those valuable resources are considered “NEW resources” (Nutrient-Energy -Water) and urge the development of cost-effective reclamation technologies through innovative research. Microbial electrochemical technologies have been studied as an emerging concept for treating wastes while recovering useful resources. This presentation will provide an overview of MET, identify the key challenges for further developing MET, and then focus on MET functions of recovering “NEW” resources. “Resource recovery” is not completed until the recovered resources are reused; therefore, several examples of applications of the recovered resources will be presented. Integration of new concepts like machine learning with MET-based resource recovery will be discussed.