Professor Tao Wu

Professor Tao Wu is Chair Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), where he leads the discipline of Chemical Engineering and Technology and directs the Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Organic Waste Conversion and Process Intensification. He is also a Visiting Fellow of Hertford College and the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, an Adjunct Distinguished Researcher at the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and an Adjunct Professor at Zhejiang University of Technology.

From August 2016 to July 2024, Tao served as Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering at UNNC, leading a multidisciplinary engineering and science unit. From January 2022 to December 2023 he served as Vice President of the university, where he founded and built the Nottingham Ningbo China Beacons of Excellence Research and Innovation Institute.

Tao holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Nottingham (2005). His honours include Fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC, 2016) and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM, 2019), and recognition on the Stanford–Elsevier World’s Top 2% Scientists list (both annual and career-long). He is a committee member of a number of national and provincial professional societies and has received multiple national and provincial awards for teaching and research excellence, including the Zhejiang Higher Education Teaching Achievement Award (2025) and the 10th China Patent Award of Excellence (2008).

Earlier in his career, Tao was a core inventor of the multi-nozzle opposed coal-water-slurry gasification technology, a foundational patent that has since been deployed in 76 projects comprising 220 gasification units. He has supervised 43 doctoral graduates and currently leads research spanning CO₂ conversion, process intensification, data-driven catalyst discovery, and climate change and carbon neutrality.