Xiaohua LU is a professor and the vice director of academic committee of State Key Laboratory of Materials-oriented Chemical Engineering at the Nanjing University of Technology and he is the fellow of The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China (CIESC). He earned his PhD in 1988 from the Nanjing Institute of Chemical Technology, majoring in Chemical Engineering. His major research interests are focused on applied thermodynamics and phase equilibria of electrolytes; modeling and simulation of industrial process operations with using advanced materials. He has published approximately 360 peer-reviewed research papers in international journals, has been Editor of two books, including the leading monograph “Molecular Thermodynamics of Complex Systems”, and has 33 national and international patents. He has been a leader in the development of fundamentally based models and theories of the thermodynamic behavior of complex fluids.  In particular, he proposed and developed the concept of the “ion hydration factor” for ionic solutions, which enabled the development of the Lu-Maurer model to calculate chemical potential gradients for non-ideal, non-equilibrium complex fluids.  He also pioneered the extension of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to interfaces, and was a leader in the construction of meso-scale models for chemical engineering systems involving complex fluids. He is a PI of National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) and obtained a silver prize of National Technical Innovation of China in 2009.He is also an adjunct professor of North Carolina State University of US and Luleå Technical University of Sweden.