SPEAKERS

Laureate Professor Ravi Naidu is CEO and Managing Director of the CRC for ContaminationAssessment and Remediation of the Environment (CRC CARE) and Founding Director of theGlobal Centre for Environmental Remediation, the University of Newcastle,Australia. Ravi’swork focuses on the remediation of contaminated soil, water and air, and the potentialimpacts of contaminants upon environmental and human health at local, national and globallevels. He has also been a leader in the shift to in situ remediation–cleaning up contaminationwhere it lies, rather than the traditional‘dig and dump’approach. Together, these approachespotentially save industry millions, if not billions, of dollars annually and make clean-up farmore feasible and effective.Ravi received his PhD and DSc in environmental science fromMassey University, New Zealand. He is an elected Fellow of the Soil Science Societies ofAmerica (2000) and New Zealand (2004), and the America Society of Agronomy (2006). In2013 was elected aFellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In2016 Ravi was elected as a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and in2017 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, Fellow of the RoyalSociety of Chemistry, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences andEngineering, Foreign Fellow of the Indian Academy of Agricultural Science and a ForeignFellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has authored or co-authored over 750 journalarticles and 80 technical publications as well as 11 patents, and co-edited 16 books and 118book chapters in the field of soil and environmental sciences. He has also supervised over 60PhD completions. In 2013, Ravi received an honorary Doctorate ofScience from Tamil NaduAgricultural University for“outstanding contributions to agriculture”,and won the RichardPratt–Banksia CEO Award at the Banksia Sustainability Awards, recognising his contributionstowards environmental sustainability. More recently Ravi was awarded 2022 Mahatma GandhiPravasi Bharatiya Samman Award and Medal for his leadership in environmental sustainabilityand in 2023 European Geosciences Union Alina Kabata-Pendias Medal in recognition of hisoutstanding contributions to soil science.