Qu Jiuhui
Academician, Chinese Academy of Engineering
CAS Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences · Tsinghua University, China
Qu Jiuhui is a distinguished environmental engineer and a leading figure in China's water science community. He is an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, a Foreign Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). He currently serves as a research professor at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and as a Distinguished Professor at Tsinghua University's School of Environment, where he directs the Center for Water and Ecology.
Regarding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, Qu's work addresses the critical challenge of balancing pollution control with carbon reduction in the water sector. He has championed the concept of “carbon-pollution synergistic control,” noting that stricter pollutant discharge standards often demand more energy and produce higher emissions—making the pursuit of both objectives simultaneously a difficult, sometimes contradictory, task. His research group has applied causal machine learning to evaluate how wastewater treatment plant scale affects GHG emission intensity, finding that larger plants generally emit less per unit of wastewater treated, though this benefit varies by regional conditions such as industrial load, rainfall, and temperature.
