Prof. Dr. Zhen FANG is the leader and founder of biomass group, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is also an adjunct full Professor of Life Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China. He is the inventor of “fast hydrolysis” process. He is specializing in thermal/biochem — ical conversion of biomass, nanocatalyst synthesis and its applications, pretreatment of biomass for biorefineries. He obtained his PhDs from China Agricultural University (Biological and Agricultural Engineering, 1991, Beijing) and McGill University (Materials Engineering, 2003, Montreal).

Richard L Smith, Jr. is Professor of Chemical Engineering, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Research Center of Supercritical Fluid Technology, Tohoku University, Japan. Professor Smith has a strong background in physical properties and separations and obtained his Ph. D. in chemical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA). His research focuses on developing green chemical processes, especially those that use water and carbon dioxide as the solvents in their supercritical state. He has expertise in physical property measurements and in sepa­ration techniques with ionic liquids and has more than 200 scientific papers, patents and reports in the field of chemical engineering. Professor Smith is the Asia Regional

Z. Fang et al. (eds.), Production of Biofuels and Chemicals with Ionic Liquids, Biofuels and Biorefineries 1, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7711-8,

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Editor for the Journal of Supercritical Fluids and has served on editorial boards of major international journals associated with properties and energy.

Xinhua Qi is Professor of Environmental Science, Nankai University, China. Professor Qi obtained his Ph. D. from the department of environmental science, Nankai University, China. Professor Qi has a strong background in environmental treatment techniques in water and in chemical transformations in ionic liquids. His research focuses on the catalytic conversion of biomass into chemicals and biofuels with ionic liquids. Professor Qi had published more than 50 scientific papers, books and reports with a number of papers being in top-ranked international journals.

[1] As an example see pioneer work of [7].

[2] As an example see pioneer work of Richard et al. [10].

[3] Lindman et al. [11] and references cited therein.

[4] As a recent selected example see [13].