Professor Wen-Ying Li is the Deputy Director of the academic committee of State Key Laboratory of Clean and Efficient Coal Utilization and Professor in Chemical Engineering and Technology at the Taiyuan University of Technology (TUT), China. She received her B.S. in coal chemical engineering from TUT in 1989 and her Ph.D. from the Dalian University of Technology in 1995. She has been a Senior Visiting Scholar at Max-Planck Institute for Coal Research, Germany in 1998, and a post-doctoral researcher at the Imperial College, London, the UK, in 2000. She has received several national awards and honors from various entities, including Distinguished Professor of "Cheung Kong Scholars Program" in 2010.

Her current research is focused entirely on enabling discovery and design of processes and catalysts for sustainable energy, including converting coal to liquid, chemicals, and fuels, providing clean conversion technology from low-rank coal and poor-quality coal, clean and efficient catalytic pyrolysis, and gasification of lignite and biomass, and optimizing traditional coal conversion processes and integrating carbon-based polygeneration system of carbon mitigation initiative. Dr. Antony Rajendran has been an Associate Professor in the State Key Laboratory of Clean and Efficient Coal Utilization at the Taiyuan University of Technology since January 2021. He obtained his Ph.D. from Anna University in 2015 and gained post-doctoral experience at the Indian Institute of Technology Mumbai for about four years. Later, he joined Prof. Wen-Ying Li?s in October 2018 and worked as a post-doctoral fellow till December 2020.

He actively participates in research activities regarding the clean utilization of coal and the production of transportation fuels from the coal tar and preparation and characterization of novel catalytic materials.