Biography:
Joan Garcia (1966) is Full Professor of Environmental Engineering at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). At the Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Joan earned a degree in biology in 1990. He began working as an assistant professor of environmental engineering at UPC in 1991. In 1996, while concurrently teaching at the UPC's Civil Engineering School, Joan gave a presentation at the UB on the engineering of wastewater treatment. In 2001 and 2002, he served as a postdoctoral research guest at the Universities of Ghent and Berkeley, respectively (2005). Joan was presented with a prize from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for the Intensification of Research Activity in 2008 for his contributions to the study of water resources and wastewater engineering. Joan received a Fulbright Commission mobility grant in 2018 to pursue a research stay in the Everglades Wetland Research Center. In order to remediate wastewater and other types of waste, Joan conducts interdisciplinary research on the creation and advancement of environmental technologies that mirror nature and maximize eco-efficiency. Particularly, research is being done on wastewater treatment technologies that also simultaneously recover materials and energy, like artificial wetlands and microalgae photobioreactors.
