International Honorary Member

One or more International Honorary Members may be selected each year by the Academy's Board of Trustees by affirmative vote of at least two-thirds of its members. The individual so honored possesses one or more of the following characteristics:

• has attained a position of eminence in the field of environmental and/or human health protection internationally or in his or her country;
• has made a single noteworthy contribution or sustained contribution to the advancement of environmental and/or human health protection in a specific area internationally or in his or her country; or
• has rendered outstanding service over a long period of time resulting in the advancement of environmental and/or human health protection internationally or in his or her country.

For the full list of eligibility criteria and information on how you can submit nominations for a worthy Environmental Engineer or Scientist, click here.

2024 International Honorary Member

Pascal Saikaly, Ph.D.

Pascal Saikaly is a Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia.  He received his B.Sc. in Biology and M.Sc. in Environmental Technology from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.  He received his Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 2005 and continued his training as a postdoctoral fellow (2005-2007) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University, USA.

He has 20+ years of experience in developing sustainable biotechnologies for wastewater reclamation and resource recovery, including bioelectrochemical technologies, aerobic granular sludge technology, microbial chain elongation technology, and anammox process for wastewater treatment.  He translates novel wastewater treatment technologies from bench-scale to real-scale.  His patented decentralized wastewater recycling technology has been demonstrated in Saudi Arabia to address the water scarcity issue.  He currently leads the Environmental Biotechnology group at KAUST.  The principal goal of the group is to optimize and develop sustainable environmental biotechnologies that enable us to fully harness the metabolic potential of microbial communities for resource recovery (e.g., reclaimed water, energy, chemicals) from waste streams.  We achieve our goal through interdisciplinary and collaborative-based research interconnecting science (e.g., electrochemistry, microbial ecology, and material science) and engineering (e.g., bioprocess engineering).  He is the author/co-author of over 128 peer-reviewed journal articles.  He has been invited to deliver more than 25 keynotes/invited talks at international conferences/workshops.  He is the Associate Editor of Water Research and Frontiers in Microbiology. 

Past Recipients