Zhen Fang is a Professor and Leader of the Biomass Group at Nanjing Agricultural University. He is the inventor of the "fast hydrolysis" process, and an elected Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. Professor Fang specializes in thermal/biochemical conversion of biomass, nanocatalyst synthesis, and their applications, pretreatment of biomass for biorefineries, and supercritical fluid processes. He holds Ph.D.s from China Agricultural University and McGill University. Professor Fang is Associate Editor of the international journals, Biotechnology for Biofuels and Journal of Supercritical Fluids (2018-2020). He has more than 20 years of research experience in the field of renewable energy and green technologies at top universities and

institutes around the globe, including one year in Spain (University of Zaragoza), three years in Japan (Biomass Technology Research Center, AIST; Tohoku University), and more than eight years in Canada (McGill) in renewable energy and green technologies.

Richard L. Smith, Jr. is a Professor at the Graduate School of Environmental Studies, at Tohoku University, Japan and is an elected Fellow of the Society of Chemical Engineers of Japan. He has a strong background in physical properties and separations and holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA). His research focuses on developing green chemical processes, especially those that use water and carbon dioxide as the solvents in their supercritical state. He is an expert on physical property measurements and separation techniques with ionic liquids and has published more than 300 scientific papers, patents, and reports in the field of chemical engineering. Professor Smith is the Asia regional editor for the Journal of Supercritical Fluids and has served on the editorial boards of major international journals.

Haixin Guo is a Professor at the Agro-Environmental Protection Institute, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (Tianjin, China). She obtained her M.S Degree in Environmental Engineering from Nankai University in China and her Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science at Tohoku University. She has published more than 60 scientific papers and has research interests in sustainable catalyst development, and hydrothermal reactions including carbonization, solvothermal and mechanochemical pretreatment of biomass, and conversion of biomass into chemicals and biofuels