Dr Ana Júlia Cavaleiro is a Research Scientist at the Centre of Biological Engineering (CEB), University of Minho (UMinho), Portugal, and Invited Assistant Professor at UMinho. Currently, she also serves as Associate Director at CEB. Her main research interests are resource recovery from waste/wastewater and environmental bioremediation, with particular focus in anaerobic processes and microbial interactions within complex communities. 

Dr Anna Schnürer is full professor in microbial biotechnology at the Department of Molecular Sciences, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).  She has been working in the field of biogas for almost 30 years, one of which is the isolation and genomic study of syntrophic acetate oxidizing bacteria (SAOB). Currently, she is leading a team  devoted to generate basic understanding on anaerobic microbial processes and to use this knowledge for different biotechnological applications.

Dr Christopher Lawson is an assistant professor at University of Toronto. Dr. Lawson’s research focuses on harnessing the metabolic processes of anaerobic microbiomes for sustainable wastewater treatment and the production of renewable bioenergy and bioproducts from waste resources. This is accomplished using the most advanced and innovative approaches from systems & synthetic biology, microbial ecology, and bioengineering.

Dr Jo de Vrieze is an associate professor at Ghent University. Dr. Vrieze's research focus on anaerobic microbial processes to achieve organic and inorganic waste valorization through the development of novel tools and methods based on microbial principles and technologies, and bring selected strategies from lab-scale fundamental “proofs of principle” to reliable full-scale technological applications.