Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering, The Grainger College of Engineering; Associate Director of Research, Institute of Sustainability, Energy, & Environment

Research Focus: Energy-Water-Environment Sustainability, Environmental Engineering and Science, Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems

Mission Statement: The Guest Research Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign specializes in the development of sustainable infrastructure. The core goal of our group is to increase access to and the sustainability of sanitation in both developing and technologically advanced communities, which we pursue by developing technologies and service delivery models that manage sanitation media (i.e., human and animal bodily excreta) as a renewable resource. Beyond sanitation, we leverage our multidisciplinary design approach to advance the sustainability of biofuels and bioproducts, agricultural systems, drinking water, stormwater, and integrated urban water systems.

Biography: Dr. Jeremy Guest (pronouns: he/him/his) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research focuses on the development of technologies for sustainable water, sanitation, biofuels and bioproducts with applications in both high-income and underserved communities.

Professor Guest currently serves as the Acting Associate Director for Research for the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) at UIUC, the Sustainable Design Lead for the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (funded by the U.S. Department of Energy), and the Illinois lead for the Sustainability Thrust of the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute (launched in 2021). He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, the Paul L. Busch Award for innovation in applied water quality research from the Water Research Foundation, and the James J. Morgan Environmental Science & Technology Early Career Award for creativity and leadership in his field.

His research has been sponsored by a number of agencies including the NSF, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. DOE, the USAID, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Professor Guest's formal training includes a B.S. and M.S. in civil engineering from Bucknell University and Virginia Tech, respectively, and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of Michigan.