Professor Lee Sang Ho from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Kookmin University (President Jeong Seung Ryul) was invited as a plenary speaker at the ‘7th International Conference on Desalination Science and Technology 2025, DESAL 2025’, held in Clearwater, Florida, USA, from November 16 to 19. He delivered a plenary talk titled “Potential and challenges of next generation desalination technologies.”

DESAL 2025 is a leading international conference in the desalination field hosted by Elsevier, where researchers, industry, and public institutions worldwide gather to share the latest research achievements in seawater desalination, water reuse, and brine resource utilization. Professor Lee Sang Ho, a global leader in desalination and concentrated brine resource recovery research, was honored to be invited as a plenary keynote speaker at DESAL 2025 in recognition of his contributions to international cooperation and technology diffusion in the field of digital desalination.

In his keynote address, Professor Lee emphasized the importance of next-generation technologies to overcome the limitations of existing desalination methods and the necessity of pilot studies for commercialization to a global audience of desalination researchers. He also presented various pilot study cases, highlighting the challenges in developing and commercializing new technologies and proposing solutions to overcome them, drawing significant interest from both academia and industry.

This invitation is based on Professor Lee Sang Ho's consistent achievements in practical research focused on energy reduction in seawater desalination and reuse plants, resource recovery from concentrate, and smart water treatment and digital twin-based operational optimization. Notably, Professor Lee Sang Ho's research encompasses next-generation desalination processes like Membrane Distillation (MD), Forward Osmosis (FO), and Pressure Retarded Osmosis (PRO), along with industrial water solutions, spanning from fundamental research to large-scale engineering applications.

Professor Lee Sang Ho earned his Ph.D. in Engineering from Seoul National University. He served as a researcher at Northwestern University in the U.S. and a senior researcher at the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT). He is currently a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Kookmin University. For over 25 years since 1999, he has conducted research and projects across the entire water sector, including seawater desalination, advanced water treatment, smart water management, ultrapure water production, and industrial wastewater reuse. He has published over 170 SCI papers and serves as an editor for Desalination and on the editorial boards of numerous international academic journals. Currently, as the overall project leader of the PROMISE Research Group for the ‘Digital Desalination and Brine Resource Recovery Technology Development Project’ supported by the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment and the Korea Environmental Industry & Technology Institute (KEITI), he is spearheading the implementation of a new technological paradigm that drives the digital transformation of water treatment technology and the realization of a circular economy.

Meanwhile, the keynote lectures at this year's DESAL 2025 plenary session featured Professor Lee Sang Ho alongside Christopher Gasson, CEO of Global Water Intelligence; Professor Menachem Elimelech from Rice University, USA; Professor Sandra Kentish from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Dr. Amit Chanan from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group (IBRD). These global experts and leaders in desalination and water treatment explored the current state and future of seawater desalination.