Biography

Dr. Antoine Trzcinski graduated with a Bachelor degree in engineering and Master degree in chemical engineering from the University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium in 2005 and in 2009 he has been awarded a Ph.D. from the chemical engineering Department of Imperial College London in the United Kingdom. During his PhD, he developed a novel process for producing biogas from municipal solid waste and for the treatment of landfill leachate. He gained practical experience in aerobic and anaerobic processes including membrane bioreactors, carbon and nitrogen removal, wastewater and organic solid waste treatment.

In 2009 he carried out research and development at pilot scale on the production of value-added products from algae at Manchester University. He gained experience in designing a plant for various projects (mass & energy balance, unit sizing, and economics) in a biorefinery context in collaboration with Shell. He worked extensively on liquid and solid state fermentation processes using biomass such as sugarcane bagasse, rapeseed meal, coffee waste, waste glycerol, wheat bran and soybean residues for the production of sugars, ethanol, enzymes, and biodiesel using integrated biorefinery concepts. 

He joined Nanyang Technological University in 2011 as a Senior Research Fellow in the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute and continued working on solid waste treatment such as waste activated sludge and wastewater treatment in anaerobic membrane bioreactors. In particular, he developed novel combinations of pre-treatment of waste activated sludge that result in greater biogas production. He generated 3 patents from this work in collaboration with the Public Utilities Board of Singapore. He was also actively involved in the preparation of pilot and full-scale anaerobic digestion projects involving municipal solid waste, food waste and waste activated sludge with governmental agencies and private companies. His long-term vision is to transform the conventional waste activated sludge process into its anaerobic counterpart which would result in an energy factory with significantly lower sludge production. To prove the concept in 2014 he managed to secure a grant from the Ministry of Education that is looking at the concurrent carbon and nitrogen removal with biogas production in membrane bioreactors. His interests also include fouling mitigation in membrane bioreactors, characterization of soluble microbial products, identification of bacterial and archaeal strains, pharmaceutical and antibiotics removal from wastewater, the fate of nanoparticles in the environment and bio electrostimulation of microbes to improve bioprocesses through interspecies electron transfer (IET).

In 2016, He joined the University of Southern Queensland as a lecturer and teaches Environmental engineering, Environmental Engineering Practice, Hydraulics, Solid and Liquid Waste Treatment and Applied Chemistry and Microbiology as well as continuing his research in these fields.