Speakers

Dr. Hsiao-Chi Chuang is a leading expert in respiratory medicine and aerosol research, with a distinguished career in environmental lung disease, aerosol drug discovery, and pulmonary pathophysiology. He currently serves as a Professor at the School of Respiratory Therapy, Taipei Medical University, and President of the Taiwan Society for Aerosol in Medicine. His research focuses on the effects of aerosolized particles, air pollution, and therapeutic interventions on respiratory health, particularly in chronic lung diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Dr. Chuang has published over 220 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals. His work has been widely cited, with an h-index of 40, reflecting his significant contributions to the field. His pioneering studies on particulate matter exposure, oxidative stress, lung microbiomes, and inflammation have provided crucial insights into novel aerosolized drug delivery systems for respiratory disease treatment.

Recognized among the World's Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University, Dr. Chuang has received multiple research and teaching excellence awards. He is also an editorial board member for prestigious journals such as the Journal of Hazardous Materials, contributing to global advancements in pulmonary medicine, air pollution research, and aerosol therapeutics.

Hyung Ju Lee is an Associate Professor and the Department Head of Mechanical Engineering at Pukyong National University (PKNU) in Busan, Republic of Korea. He served as a Member of the Advisory Board for the National Research Foundation of Korea from 2022 to 2024 and has been serving as Vice President of ILASS-Korea since 2025. He has been a faculty member at PKNU since 2020 and previously served on the faculty of Cheongju University from 2019 to 2020. Prior to that, he was a principal researcher at the Agency for Defense Development (ADD) in Daejeon, Korea, from 1999 to 2019. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 2009, his M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 1999, and his B.S. in Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering from Seoul National University in 1996.

During his career, Prof. Lee has taught and conducted research in fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, propulsion engineering, engineering mathematics, and numerical analysis, with a focus on supercritical flow and heat transfer, thermal cracking of hydrocarbons, and supersonic combustion. He has led projects aimed at optimizing the design of mini- and microchannels for active regenerative cooling systems in hypersonic cruise vehicles and enhancing the efficiency of supersonic combustion for scramjet engines. These projects have been carried out in collaboration with several research institutes and defense companies in the Republic of Korea.

Chihiro Inoue received Ph.D. at Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in University of Tokyo and worked as Assistant and Associate Professor. From 2018, he works for Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Kyushu University as Associate Professor. He is a recipient of AIAA Best Paper Award and ASME Best Paper Award. His research interest is to uncover the mechanics underlying beautiful phenomena associated with multi-phase flows including atomization, mixing, wetting, and phase change via the combined approaches of high-speed imaging and physical modeling.

His curiosity includes a traditional Japanese firework, where he discovered a new atomization process, called “successive fragmentation” of droplets, published by Physical Review Letters in 2017. Based on the study on fireworks featured by several TV programs, many people in Japan mistakenly believe that he is a pyrotechnician, not a professor. His practical study covers the spray mixing in rocket engines as well as evaporative film cooling accompanying droplet entrainment. He established the theoretical prediction models for performance and cooling of rocket engines in a simultaneous manner, leading to the optimum design framework, which contributes to the development of latest rocket engines.

Droplet breakup and collision are fundamental to spray dynamics, requiring models that accurately capture both droplet-scale physics and carrier-phase interactions. This talk presents two recent advances in multiscale modeling for spray simulations. First, we introduce a dynamic catastrophic breakup model implemented in an in-house OpenFOAM-based detonation solver. Unlike conventional approaches, this model eliminates the need for parameter fitting while delivering superior predictions of detonation parameters through physics-based resolution of breakup mechanisms. Second, we develop a novel Eulerian-Lagrangian framework for dual-fuel spray impingement and combustion, solving a generalized spray equation for high-dimensional droplet probability distribution functions. Utilizing this framework, we achieve—for the first time—the computational reproduction of the distinctive "popping phenomenon" in hypergolic bipropellant spray combustion, enabled by our modeling of intra-droplet mixing and liquid-phase reactions. These advances underscore how multiscale strategies can overcome critical challenges in complex multiphase combustion simulations.

Dr. Peng Zhang joined the City University of Hong Kong as an associate professor in 2022. Before that, he was an assistant and then associate professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University during 2012-2022. He received a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 2010 and worked as a Combustion Energy Research Fellow at Princeton University during 2010-2012. Dr. Zhang’s current research areas are droplet and spray dynamics, theoretical and numerical combustion, theoretical chemical kinetics, and AI for science. He has published more than 120 papers in international peer-reviewed journals in these areas (see https://www.rgcombustion.org/ for details). He is the founding chairman of ILASS-Hong Kong and a guest editor of Atomization and Sprays.

Dr. Yansong Shen is a tenured Professor and ARC Future Fellow at UNSW Sydney. He leads the Process Modelling and Optimisation of Reacting Flows (ProMO Lab), focusing on complex reactive flow processes in industries such as resource and energy sectors. His expertise spans chemical engineering, process control, and renewable energy technologies. Prof. Shen has secured numerous research grants and published extensively on topics like hydrogen production, solar panel recycling, and blast furnace dynamics.

Professor Alvin B. Culaba, Ph.D. is the Vice President of the National Academy of Science and Technology, Republic of the Philippines and the Commissioner on Science & Technology, UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines. He had served as Philippine Energy Adviser (2007-2010) and as independent board member of the Philippine Electricity Market Corporation (2014-2016). As an expert panel member of the Philippine Joint Congressional Commission on Science, Technology, and Engineering (COMSTE) he assessed the S&T competitiveness of the energy sector and was commissioned to undertake energy policy studies that led to the crafting of the country’s energy twin-bill, the Biofuels Act of 2006 (RA9367) and the Renewable Energy Act of 2008 (RA9513). His over 200 scientific publications in ISI- and Scopus-indexed journals are amongst the highly cited as evidenced by his inclusion in the Top 2% of world’s scientists based on impact (Stanford List 2023), primarily on the area of energy and environmental sustainability. He sits as editorial board member and reviewer of prestigious journals. He has delivered numerous keynotes and plenary lectures in international conferences and is a Visiting Scholar to universities in Asia, UK, and the US. He was a former Executive Vice President of De La Salle University Manila, Philippines, and currently, a Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director and co-founder of the Center for Engineering and Sustainable Development Research (CESDR).