Sustainability Webinar | Insights from the 2024 Sustainability Carbon Neutrality Award Winners
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20th Sustainability Webinar
Insights from the 2024 Sustainability Carbon Neutrality Award Winners
We are pleased to invite you to the Sustainability 2024 Carbon Neutrality Award Ceremony, which will be held online at 4:00 pm CEST on September 29, 2025.
The Sustainability 2024 Carbon Neutrality Award was established in 2022 to recognize scholars who have made unique and outstanding contributions, both academically and societally, to carbon neutrality or related issues.
During the ceremony, we will have the opportunity to learn more about the four award winners and hear their presentations on their latest groundbreaking research pertaining to “Carbon Neutrality".
Date: 29 September , 2025
Time: 4:00 pm CEST 10:00 am EDT
Webinar ID: 861 6981 9347
Webinar Secretariat: journal.webinar@mdpi.com
Meet Our Speakers
Prof. Wei Wu
School of Energy and Environment, City University of Hong Kong, China;
Prof. Wu is an Associate Professor at City University of Hong Kong. His research is focused on building energy and sustainability technologies (BEST) towards carbon neutrality, including advanced heat pumps, novel working fluids, thermal energy storage, advanced thermal management, renewable energy utilization, and net-zero energy buildings. He has published more than 140 SCI papers, obtained/filed 25 CN/US patents, and published two English books. Prof. Wu is among the Top 2% Most Highly Cited Scientists Worldwide. He received the NSFC Excellent Young Scientists Fund, the IIR Willis H. Carrier Young Researcher Award, the NIST Distinguished Associate Award, the Global Excellent Young Scholar Award of Energy and Built Environment, the National HVAC Distinguished Young Scholar Award, the National Metamaterials Distinguished Young Scholar Award, the CityUHK SEE Excellent Innovation Award, the CityUHK SEE Excellent Young Researcher Award, and the Academic New Talent of Tsinghua University. He won nine Gold Medals at various International Invention Exhibitions. He serves as an expert of IEA-SHC and IEA-HPT. He is a Co-Founder of Solar.E Tech Limited. He is a Co-Chair of ICEE, an Associate Editor of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, and an Editorial Board Member of several SCI journals.
Dr. Francisco Javier Cano
Instituto de Investigaciones en Materiales (IIM), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico;
Francisco Javier Cano is a researcher specializing in the synthesis and characterization of nanomaterials for environmental and energy applications. His work focuses on carbon-based materials and hybrid nanostructures, particularly in adsorption and photocatalysis.
Dr. Ming Hu
School of Architecture and the College of Engineering, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA;
Ming Hu, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Architecture and Concurrent Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, where she also serves as Associate Dean for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Work. Trained as an architect and building scientist, Dr. Hu leads an interdisciplinary research group that advances sustainable, health-conscious, and low-carbon solutions for the built environment. Her work integrates life cycle assessment, AI-enabled diagnostics, and public health modeling, with particular focus on decarbonizing building stock and improving housing equity.
Dr. Hu has authored four books and over 130 peer-reviewed publications. She has served as Principal Investigator or Co-PI on projects supported by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, and international research agencies, with cumulative funding exceeding $20 million. As a 2022–2023 Jefferson Science Fellow, she served as a senior science advisor at the U.S. Department of State, contributing to international environmental policy on circular economy and urban sustainability.
Dr. Carolina Blanco Fontao
Departamento de Didáctica General, Específicas y Teoría de la Educación, Universidad de Léon, Léon, Spain;
PhD in the branch of Sciences who, after teaching in Compulsory Secondary Education, and combining it with university teaching in the Master of Teacher Training in the module of Physics and Chemistry, she joined full time to the area of Didactics of Experimental Sciences, where she currently serves as Associate Professor. Her main lines of research are focused on the determination of different levels of scientific literacy in different demographic groups, the curricular inclusion of the Sustainable Development Goals at different educational levels, the training of science teachers, as well as teaching innovation methodologies for the acquisition of scientific competences.
Sponsors and Partners
Organizer
The webinar was hosted via Zoom and required registration to attend. The full recording can be found below. In order to learn about future webinars, you can sign up to our newsletter by clicking “Subscribe” at the top of the page.
Sponsored by MDPI journal Sustainability, this award recognizes applicants who have made exceptional academic or societal contributions to carbon neutrality, either in general or in relation to a specific carbon-neutrality-related issue.
Additionally, we are pleased to announce that Sustainability is now inviting applicants for the Sustainability 2025 Carbon Neutrality Award. All applications will be assessed by an Evaluation Committee led by our Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Marc A. Rosen.
More information can be read here: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/awards/3491.