Webinar title: Sustainable Bio-Based Products for Environmental Applications

Speaker: Nin Yan

Webinar time: 10:00 am, July 4, 2025 (Friday)

Venue: Room 231, New Environmental Building

Inviter: Chengliang Mao, Lizhi Zhang

Abstract:

Biomass materials are abundant, inexpensive, renewable, and environmental-friendly, making them sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels as feedstock. They also possess distinctive structural, surface, and chemical functionalities that are well-suited for various environmental applications. My team has developed a variety of novel bio-based highly functional adsorbents and membranes from wood, lignin, chitosan, and other biomass materials. Besides capable of highly efficient oil/water separation or selective dye adsorption properties, these bio-based products are exerting a lower end-of-life impact on the environment. For example, lignin was explored as bio-based polyols to make lignin-based photothermal PU foams capable of rapid clean-up of crude oil spills with outstanding adsorption capacities, while these bio-based PU foams could also be degraded in alkaline environments after usage to reduce secondary pollution concerns. Taking advantage of anisotropic hierarchical porous structural feature of wood, we developed high-performance, flexible, and durable asymmetric Janus membranes with excellent promise for tackling complex liquid separation challenges, offering sustainable and scalable alternatives for industrial applications. An overview of some latest findings from these research activities will be presented.

About the speaker:

Professor Ning Yan holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Bioproducts at the Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry in the University of Toronto. She has also held the University of Toronto Distinguished Professorship in Forest Biomaterials Engineering and an Endowed Chair in Value Added Wood and Composites previously. Professor Yan’s expertise is in bio-based materials science, green chemistry, and bio-based products with more than 240 peer-reviewed publications in leading scientific journals with an H-index of 59. Professor Yan is an elected Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC), International Academy of Wood Science (IAWS), and the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE). She is currently serving as an associate editor of the ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering journal. Professor Yan is also a distinguished visiting professor at the City University of Hong Kong.