Dr. Lu also received his second Federation Fellowship award an Australian Research Council Fellowship for his work on photocatalysts and sustainable energy. Dr. Lu, working at UQ's Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, is developing a new type of solar material that is more efficient in harvesting sunlight and costs less to produce. He and his research group are also developing more efficient processes for water purification and converting carbon dioxide to a liquid fuel using this class of photoactive materials.

“We are working on a new class of photocatalysts with high visible light activity that could lead to cost effective solar energy conversion to electricity or to split water to hydrogen,” he said in a UQ media report. “We are also developing more efficient processes for water purification and converting carbon dioxide to a liquid fuel using this class of photoactive materials.”

In summary, Dr. Lu’s clean technology and bionano nanoscience research includes these projects:

• Professor Lu’s research group operates through the ARC Centre of Excellence for Functional Nanomaterials’s five research programs - nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanostructured films and membranes, nanobiomaterials, and computational nanomaterials science. More than 20 projects are being conducted in the group largely falling in the following three areas:

• Clean energy production and utilization – new generation of solar cells, gas to liquid conversion, hydrogen production, purification and storage, fuel cells, high energy density supercapacitors.

• Environmental technologies - photocatalytic reduction of pollutants in water and air, desalination membranes, and novel adsorbents for water recycling, CO2 capture.

• Health care - biomaterials for orthopedic applications, nanoparticles for drug and gene delivery, enzyme encapsulation and biosensors.

Dr. Lu is also Chair of Nanotechnology in Chemical Engineering at UQ and Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Functional Nanomaterials. He is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and has served as a member of the ARC College of Experts. He has also been a member of two Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council working groups, playing a key role in developing the National Nanotechnology Strategy.