Professor Semali Perera BSc (Eng) , PhD, CEng, FIChemE

Professor Semali Perera has a BSc (Eng) in Chemical Engineering and a PhD from Brunel University, Uxbridge. She is a Charted Engineer and a Fellow of the IChemE. In 2007 she won the prestigious Royal Society Brian Mercer Award for Innovation in pollution control technology.

In June 2007-2010, she was Research Director for the University spinout company Nanoporous Solutions Ltd. In 2017, she was the winner of the Academic Award in the UK’s biggest programme championing women in technology, FDM everywoman in Technology Awards. She specialises in adsorption, membranes and low-pressure drop adsorbent structures for advanced separations, micro-pollutant removal, nanomaterials and microencapsulation of drug molecules. She is currently the Director of the Centre for Advanced Separations Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Bath. Her research is funded by a range of industrial organisations and government bodies.

Professor Perera leads a team of scientists at the University of Bath whose diverse areas of speciality are invaluable to the research of Aqualithium.

Dr. Salman Shahid – Lecturer

Dr Salman Shahid, has over ten years experience working in three main areas, all aiming to characterise and produce process intensification for more sustainable technologies: Membrane Science and Engineering, Catalytic Reaction and Reactor Engineering and Water Treatment Technologies.

Salman studied Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Louvain, Belgium. He conducted his PhD studies at University of Twente (The Netherlands), University of Leuven (Belgium) and University of Montpelier (France) with PhD in Chemical Engineering and PhD in Bioscience and Surface Engineering.

He has long-term international experience of working in leading academic and industrial research centres. Before his appointment as Assistant Professor (in August 2018) at the University of Bath, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Technical University of Delft (NL), University of Bath (UK) and Imperial College London (UK). Salman is associated with the Centre for Advanced Separations Engineering (CASE) and Water Innovation and Research Centre (WIRC) two of Europe’s leading centres for the development of advanced materials and processes for separations and water research.

His research activities are mainly aimed at developing new strategies for the design and synthesis of functional materials from molecular building blocks and advancing the understanding of the structure-property relationship of materials. His research focuses on the rational design, characterisation, and testing of multifunctional nanomaterials as a platform for addressing environmental, water and energy sustainability challenges (via, for instance, new approaches to CO2 capture/separation and conversion as well as waste-water treatment and liquid (solvent) separations).

Dr. Jannis Wenk – Lecturer

Dr Jannis Wenk studied Environmental Engineering at the Technical University
Berlin. He conducted his PhD-studies at Eawag and ETH Zurich from where he graduated in 2012. Subsequently, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley in California.

In 2015 Jannis joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of
Bath as a Lecturer in Water Science and Engineering.  His research incorporates both water engineering and water science and includes for example developing more efficient technologies for gas transfer and investigating novel types of process combinations for water treatment.

Abbas Daruwala B.Sc. Imperial College London

Abbas is not only a Marine Engineer (B.Sc. First Class in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering) but he has had valuable hands on experience at sea with the Maersk Line specialising in pumping systems. He is currently at Imperial completing his studies for anMSc in Sustainable Energy. Abbas will oversee the development of the Aqualithium Harvester.