Engineering Professor Wins Global Sustainability Award

[Editor's Note: This story is part of a Texas Global series celebrating UT Austin faculty members whose work has received international honors or awards.]  

The United Arab Emirates selected Guihua Yu, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, as the sole recipient of the Distinguished Researcher Award under the United Arab Emirates' Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Water Award.  

The award recognizes individuals, organizations and research centers discovering innovative ways to produce clean water by using renewable energy.  

"This award truly recognizes many outstanding works from my former and current students over the past years, including a large number of international team members with various backgrounds and skills from chemistry, materials science, engineering,” Yu said.  

For the past decade, Yu has contributed to innovations aimed at improving access to drinking water, such as water-collecting gel film for dry climates, self-watering soil to increase global farmland, and water-generating hydrogels that purify wastewater or seawater using sunlight.  

Additionally, Yu was recently elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, an international nonprofit dedicated to promoting scientific and societal progress. The organization elects members based on their outstanding governance, science, engineering and arts achievements. 

In the future, Yu and his research team will continue refining their solar water technologies and work with global foundations and environmental specialists to broaden the use of these technologies across the world. They will also further investigate new technologies to address increasing water and energy accessibility and security challenges.  

To learn more about Yu and his work, visit the original article at the Cockrell School of Engineering website.