On May 25, 2026, Professor Yuyou Li from Tohoku University, Japan, delivered an academic report titled "Innovative Thinking and Process Development for Wastewater Treatment Systems in the Era of Carbon Neutrality" to faculty and students of our college. The event was held in Meeting Room E202, School of Environment, and hosted by He Huan, Dean of the College. Over 40 faculty and students attended the session.

Prof. Yuyou Li is a Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering and the Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Tohoku University, Japan, and Director of the Laboratory of Environmental Conservation Engineering. He previously served as Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Dean of the Division of Sustainable Engineering and Social-Environmental Systems, Tohoku University, and as a Council Member of the Japan Society on Water Environment and the Japan Society of Civil Engineers (JSCE). He also served as Chairperson of the Environmental Engineering Committee of JSCE. Prof. Li has long been dedicated to research on environmental conservation systems and anaerobic biological treatment technologies. He has published more than 600 academic papers, including over 500 SCI-indexed articles, with an H-index of 96. He has supervised over 100 master's students, doctoral students, and postdoctoral researchers. His honors include the Tohoku University President's Award for Education (2014), the Japan Society on Water Environment Paper Award (2019), the Academic Award of the same society (2021), and the Distinguished Service Award from the Japan Sewage Works Association. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the international journal Bioresource Technology, and as an Editorial Board Member of several Chinese journals, including Acta Scientiae Circumstantiae, Chinese Journal of Environmental Engineering, and China Water & Wastewater.

During the lecture, Professor Yuyou Li took China’s national strategies of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality as the backdrop and systematically elaborated on the significance and development directions of low-carbon transformation in the wastewater treatment sector. Combining cutting-edge research and engineering practice from both domestic and international contexts, he conducted an in-depth analysis of the bottlenecks in conventional wastewater treatment processes regarding energy consumption, carbon emissions, and sludge disposal. He highlighted the team’s latest research achievements in physicochemical and biochemical concentration, anaerobic methane fermentation/bio-natural gas production, membrane bioreactor (MBR), anaerobic ammonium oxidation (Anammox), and hydroxyapatite (HAP) phosphorus recovery units. Furthermore, he proposed innovative thinking and future research directions in wastewater treatment, including the integration and intelligent control of novel-concept wastewater treatment systems. The lecture was endowed with both theoretical significance and practical value, presenting faculty and students with new pathways for the development of environmental engineering technologies under the “dual carbon” context.

During the interactive Q&A session, faculty and students actively raised questions and engaged in in-depth discussions with Professor Yuyou Li on key issues including technical application scenarios, reactor design, and method selection under different operating conditions. The session was marked by a strong academic atmosphere. This forum closely followed the frontier of the “dual carbon” strategy, focusing on technological innovation in wastewater treatment. It established a high-level academic exchange platform for faculty and students, deepening their understanding of low-carbon wastewater treatment systems while providing valuable directions and inspiration for related research in the field of environmental engineering at our college.