Keynote and Invited Talks

Prof. Reddy , Dr. Krishna R. Reddy is University Scholar, Distinguished Researcher, and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Director of Sustainable Engineering Research Laboratory (SERL), and also the Director of the Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering Laboratory (GAGEL) in the Department of Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Dr. Reddy received Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA. He received gold medals for being first in his class of B.S. (Civil Engineering) at Osmania University, India, and M.S. (Civil Engineering) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.
Dr. Reddy has over 28years of research, teaching,and consulting experience within the broad fieldsof civil, geotechnical, materials,environmental,and sustainable/resilient engineering,addressing the nexus among sustainability, resiliency, infrastructure, water, energy, and the environment.His research expertise includes:(1) environmental remediation of soils, sediments, groundwater, and stormwater; (2) solid and hazardous waste management, waste containment,and landfill engineering; (3) characterization and engineering applications of waste/recycled materials; (4) life cycle assessment and sustainable & resilient engineering; and (5) geotechnical engineering. His research is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency, several prominent state and local government agencies, and industries. His research includes laboratory studies, field experiments, and computer modeling, ultimately leading to fundamental advances and practical solutions to the real-world problems.
Dr. Reddy is the author of fourmajor books: (1) Geoenvironmental Engineering: Site Remediation, Waste Containment, and Emerging Waste Management Technologies, (2) Sustainable Engineering: Drivers, Metrics, Tools, and Applications,(3) Sustainable Remediation of Contaminated Sites, and (4)Electrochemical Remediation Technologies for Polluted Soils, Sediments and Groundwater. He is also author of 259journal papers, 27edited books/conference proceedings, 22book chapters, and 226full conference papers(with h-index of 64with over 14,000 citations). Dr. Reddy has given 231invited presentations in the U.S.A. and 21other countries (Argentina, Brazil, Canada,China, Colombia, France,Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Macedonia, Mexico, Spain, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Turkey, Thailand, andU.K.).
Dr. Reddy has served or currently serves as an Associate Editor or Editorial Board Member of over 10 different journals, including ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering, ASTM Geotechnical Testing Journal, ASCE Journal of Hazardous, Toxic and Radioactive Waste, Journal of Hazardous Materials, among others. He has also served on various professional committees, including the Geoenvironmental Engineering Committee and Technical Coordinating Council of Geo-Institute (GI) of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the Environmental Geotechnics Committee of International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE).
Dr. Reddy has received several awards for excellence in research and teaching, including ASCE Wesley W. Horner Award, ASTM Hogentogler Award, UIC Distinguished Researcher Award, Universityof Illinois Scholar Award, and University of Illinois Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers(FASCE),a Diplomate of Geotechnical Engineering(DGE), and a Board Certified Environmental Engineer (BCEE). He is also a registered Professional Civil Engineer (PE) and an EnvisionTMSustainability Professional (ENV SP).

Prof. Dinesh Mohan has more than 21 years of diverse research experience aimed at the challenging problems in the area of Energy and Environment. A key theme throughout Prof. Mohan’s career has been the merger of basic academic science research with the development of applications to industrial processes. The merger of basic science with engineering follows from his research pathway.
Professor Dinesh Mohan conducts research on water (ground and surface) and wastewater monitoring and development of sustainable treatment technologies, use of thermochemical platform for the production of biofuels (biooil) from lignocellulosic biomass. Prof. Mohan is also involved in biochar development, characterization and utilization in water filtration, soil immobilization and fertility, carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation. Laboratory and field studies to evaluate the effects of biochar on crop yield, nutrient retention, nitrogen cycles, nitrous oxide and methane dynamics, water holding capacity and carbon cycling are in progress/completed. Prof. Mohan has developed a variety of activated carbons/magnetic carbons/nanosprbents/biochars for the remediation of organic (phenols, dyes, pharmaceuticals, pesticides etc.) and inorganic (heavy metal ions, fluoride, nitrate etc.) pollutants from water and wastewater.

Dr. Vivek obtained his B.E. degree (1988-92) in Pulp & Paper Engineering, and M.E. degree (1992-94) in Chemical Engineering with specialization in Industrial Pollution Abatement. He completed his Ph.D. in 2000 (Thesis title: “Waste management for small scale Pulp & Paper Industry”) from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He was a Post Doctoral Fellow, IWT, Applied Science University, Wolfenbuttel, Germany from 2000-01. He has been involved in teaching and research in IIT Roorkee and IIT Delhi since 2004. He was a Visiting Research Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada from 2014/6-2014/7. He has been the recipient of many awards and honors including SRF Grant awarded from Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute for a proposal entitled ‘Novel Treatment Technology for High Salinity Water Using Membrane Distillation. He was elected International Director of Bio-Forest Product Division of American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) for three years from 2014-2017. Dr. Vivek has more than 18 years of research & development and academics experience on the development of low-cost technologies for the treatment of waste from medium and small industries. He has been involved in many research projects, mostly related to monitoring and treatment of industrial waste. He is a Project Investigator (PI) of the Indo-UK project entitled “Valorising Waste from Sugar Cane and Associated Industries via Innovations in Pre-treatment, Biotransformation and Process Intensification [vWa].

Prof. Manik is currently serving as Associate Professor in the Department of Polymer and Process Engineering at IIT Roorkee since 2018. He joined IITR in January 2013 as Assistant Professor in the same department. He holds a PhD (IIT Bombay), M.Tech (IIT Kanpur) and B.Tech (HBTI Kanpur) in Chemical Engineering. Prior to joining IITR, he has served extensively in industry (3M, Indo Gulf Fertilizers & Chem. Ltd., Classic Stripes Pvt. Ltd.) and academia (BITS Pilani, BIET Jhansi) totaling up his rich experience to 16+ years. In industry, he is credited with creating and commercializing several innovative products and protecting IP through significant number of patents and record of inventions. His research interests include: Molecular modeling and simulations of polymers/materials, Chemical process modeling and simulation, Development of novel and industrially significant polymer composites, coatings, sealants and adhesives. He has ~100 research publications in international peer reviewed SCI journals, patent applications, conferences and book chapters. He has significantly valued 41 publications in peer-reviewed Chemical Engineering and Polymer Journals of repute such as Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Energy, Composites B: Engineering, Polymer, to name a few and holds 6 granted patents/patent applications of industrial commercial relevance, contributed to 11 books, and made 41 conference publications. He has executed 5 research projects and supervised 1 post-doctoral, 2 PhD (+7 ongoing), 10 M.Tech students and 23 B.Tech projects. In his department at IIT Roorkee, he has recorded amongst the highest average number of research journal publications/patent applications consistently in the last few years and maintained amongst the highest student appraisal score of in teaching. Among several awards received by him to disseminate professional knowledge and research, he has been awarded with the prestigious APAC level TechForum Contribution Award at 3M, and secondment as visiting faculty sanctioned by the President of India for teaching at international platform at Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand, and VICAL Award for Best Paper by Institute of Chemical Engineers (IIChe), India. He has been an invited speaker, guest and sessions chair at several national and international conferences and workshops in India and abroad.

Dr.Agnihotri currently works as Senior lecturer at Swedish Centre for Resource Recovery, University of Borås, Sweden. She has completed PhD from IIT Roorkee, India. She received the postdoctoral fellowship for three years from Research Council of Norway and worked at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim to enhance the biorefinery process development in Norway. As a scientist, her expertise is in the field of Industrial Biotechnology, Biorefinery and Resource Recovery.
Since 2015, she had worked at University of Borås in different research projects in Biotechnology group and teaching the course Biotechnology to undergraduate and Masters Students. She has supervised 6 Masters Specialization projects and currently supervising 4 PhD students. Focus of her research has been on pretreatment processes of biomass for their valorization into a number of commercial products. She has also worked extensively on growing filamentous fungi on waste products, scaling up the process and their development into functional food and feed along with finding more interesting ways to valorize the biomass for a sustainable future. Currently she is working on to develop new climate smart proteins to be used in food and feed industry and to strengthen research and innovation collaboration by developing a test and demonstration environment in Europe. The project is funded by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), Interreg IVB, North Sea Region Programme. She has around 15 publications in peer reviewed journals and has authored 3 book chapters. She is a reviewer for several international scientific journals such as Elsevier, Bioresource Technology, Bioengineered, Wood Chemistry and Technology, and BioResources. Her objective is to contribute to a sustainable future and a more conscious next generation through her research and teaching work.

Dr. A.Arivazhagan is currently a Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at Robert Gordon University. His area of research involves Manufacturing Technology / CAD/ CAM/ CAPP/ CNC machining (5/3 axis – ceramics and metals) / Industry 4.0 / Cyber Physical Integration/ DFMA / FEA for Design & Manufacturing / Software development using C/C++/JAVA/C#.Net/Python/ Cloud & Web based.
Dr.A.Arivazhaganhas a manufacturing research background and prior joining RGU he has led various post-doctoral positions in the UK universities. This is on implementing Manufacturing / Machining / CAD/CAM/CAPP automation technologies for industries through academia giving considerable research to business impact in terms of cost & lead time reduction. Those include (i) University of Birmingham (2017-2020) (ii) Queen’s University Belfast (2015-2017) (iii) Nottingham Trent University (2014-2015) and (iv) Coventry University (2013-2014).
With his experience of more than 12+ years he has commendable ‘hands on’ skillsin Hardware, Software and ICT technologies which mainly includes operating (i) CNC Machines (Siemens / Heidenhain / Fanuc) (ii) Metrological machines such as CMM (Carl-Zeiss) and Alicona (3D Light based measurement), Microscopes, SEM etc. (iii) CAD/CAM/CAPP usage (NX, Solidworks, AutoCAD, Vericut etc.,) and their software development using C/C++/JAVA/C#.Net/Python.
Dr.A.Arivazhagan is a Six-Sigma Green Belt for Quality (General Electric (GE)) and Chartered Engineer (IMechE, UK) registered with Engineering Council, UK. Also he is a Member of IMechE, UK / IET, UK. He has high exposure over the Manufacturing / CAD/CAM/CAPP techniques / ICT’s involved in various industrial businesses (Oil & Gas / Aviation) and strong attitude over academic research-based contribution and income generation.