Details: Prof. Lesley Sloss Lesley currently leads the United Nations Environment Programme Coal Partnership, providing expert advice to the negotiations on the Minamata Convention on Mercury. She is also an expert member of several UN expert committees such as the UNECE Committee on Sustainable Development and the Coalbed Methane Working Group. She has established and chaired several long-running conferences including CEM- the Conference on Emissions monitoring (established in 1997) and MEC – Mercury and multipollutant Emissions from Coal (which ran its 15th event in Jakarta in 2023). Lesley is a Visiting Professor with the CEP at Strathclyde and also an Adjunct Professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Lesley worked for the International Centre for Sustainable Carbon, a Technical Collaboration Programme under the auspices of the International Energy Agency, for over 34 years, producing reports and guidance materials to promote clean energy, especially in emerging economies. She has just completed a four-year, $2million US State Department project to accelerate emission reduction in the energy sectors in India and Indonesia.

Lesley now works part-time for EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) in the USA.

Details: Ashu Dastoor is a Senior Research Scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). She leads the development and application of mechanistic environmental models at ECCC, specializing in the physicochemical evolution of atmospheric mercury and aerosols on global to urban scales, including the Arctic. Constraining and explaining processes, mass balance, and spatiotemporal variability in observations of chemicals of concern to support decision-making are a focus of her research; she has coordinated multiple multi-model ensemble contributions to Global (United Nations Environment Programme) and Arctic (Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme) mercury assessments. Currently, she is leading an international initiative on integrated multi-model analysis of environmental mercury cycling to inform the Minamata Convention on Mercury and the Heavy Metals Protocol of the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution.

Details: Prof. Shuxiao Wang is full professor at School of Environment, Tsinghua University and the Director of the Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Sources and Control of Air Pollution Complex in China. Her research interests include mercury emissions, transport, and control policies. She has published over 500 peer-reviewed journal papers and has been recognized as a Global Highly Cited Researcher since 2019. She has served as a Scientific Committee Member of the ICMGP since 2017, Co-chair of Global Observation System for Mercury (GOS4M) since 2020, and a Technical experts group on emissions of the Minamata Convention on Mercury since 2013.

Details: Guey-Rong Sheu is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at National Central University in Taiwan. His research focuses on atmospheric Hg cycling in East and Southeast Asia, and the links between climatological phenomena (such as ENSO) and atmospheric Hg concentrations. He started long-term monitoring of speciated atmospheric Hg at the Lulin Atmospheric Background Stations (LABS) in central Taiwan since 2006 to study the export of atmospheric Hg from East Asia. Since 2008, he assisted Taiwan’s Ministry of Environment (MOE) in establishing and operating a nation-wide wet Hg deposition monitoring network to collect weekly rainwater samples for Hg analysis. He started working with Taiwan MOE, USEPA and the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP) to promote the collaboration in atmospheric Hg monitoring in the Asia-Pacific region since 2012, resulting in the establishment of the Asia Pacific Mercury Monitoring Network (APMMN) in 2016 that addresses significant data gaps in a region where atmospheric Hg emissions are the highest globally but available measurement data are limited.

Details: Dr. Teresa Mathews is a Senior Scientist and the Group Leader for the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Her research is focused on understand ing how ecological interactions can affect the biogeochemical cycles of nutrients and contaminants in aquatic ecosystems. She works on various field and lab projects related to the biotransformation and bioaccumulation of mercury and other contaminants in aquatic food webs. She has worked on large scale projects to mitigate toxic algal blooms and to remediate contaminated sites using ecological manipulation approaches. She has also used ecological manipulation approaches to sustainably increase algal biomass productivity and stability for the biofuel industry through the use of recycled (waste) water and algal polycultures. Dr. Mathews has previously worked at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Monaco and the Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety in France on field and modeling projects related to radionuclide transfer in aquatic food chains. She received her B.A. in Biology and French from New York University in 1999, and her Ph.D. in Coastal Oceanography from the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York in 2007.

Details: Originally from Nagaon, Assam, Dr Biswakarma is a senior researcher currently working at the University of Bristol in England, UK Research & Innovation (UKRI)-endorsed Global Talent. Previously, he earned his doctorate from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He worked at the world-leading Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology-Eawag, where he spent a decade learning his water and environmental sustainability expertise. Dr Biswakarma is keen to address and provide solutions to the serious challenges that climate and environmental change pose for public and ecological health through his commitment to research, communication, and advocacy. His primary research focuses on understanding biogeochemical processes occurring in waters, soils, and at soil-water interfaces, which significantly impact water quality and agriculture. His vital research on iron cycling and the contamination of arsenic and mercury has recently been highlighted in renowned outlets, including the cover of XMaS (ESRF), Forbes, The Diplomat, MIT News, Geographical, and the BBC.

Details: Asif Qureshi works on on understanding the occurrence and impacts of chemical pollution. Works have focused on the presence of organic chemicals and potentially toxic trace elements such as mercury, in the environment and/or humans. His research group employs a combination of experimental and theoretical modelling tools to achieve our study-specific goals. AQ is an Associate Professor in Environmental Science, Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad. He has a B.Tech. in Civil Engineering from IIT Kanpur, M.A.Sc. in Environmental Engineering from the University of British Columbia, and a D.Sc. in Environmental Science from ETH Zürich. Prior to joining IIT Hyderabad he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.