Dr. Athanasios (Thanos) Bourtsalas is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Earth and Environmental Engineering Department of Columbia University and Manager of the Waste to Energy Research and Technology Council (WtERT) at Columbia University. He obtained his M.S. in Earth & Environmental Engineering from Columbia University and PhD from Imperial College London. He is involved in many advisory projects globally for the development of pre-feasibility and feasibility studies of integrated waste managements that achieve maximum, commercially viable, extraction and recycling of usable materials, combined with energy recovery from the remaining residual waste (Waste to Energy, WTE). He is the Principal Investigator for a project funded by the Columbia Global Centres and is related to the advancement of waste management in Latin America. He is participating in the technical advisory panel of Singapore’s Environmental Protection Agency for the development of environmental guidelines for the beneficial utilization of Waste-to-Energy Bottom Ash. Also, he was a co-author to the Solid Waste chapter of the Assessment Report on Climate Change and Cities (ARC3-2), developed by the Earth Institute of Columbia University and presented at the COP-21 in Paris.Dr. Themelis obtained his B. Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from McGill University (Montreal, Canada) in chemical engineering. In the first part of his career, he was Director of the Engineering Division of the Noranda Research Center in Pointe Claire where he invented and helped build the first continuous smelting and converting process, the Noranda Process. This process eliminated the use of fossil fuels in copper smelting and provided for the capture of sulphur dioxide for the manufacture of sulphuric acid. Before joining Columbia University, he was Vice President of Technology of Kennecott Corp., the major no-ferrous company at that time. He was appointed as Professor by Columbia University (New York City, U.S.A.) in 1980 and was elected to Stanley-Thompson Chair of Chemical Metallurgy in 1988. He was chairman of the Henry Krumb School of Mines and founded Columbia’s Earth Engineering Center in 1996. In 1995, he introduced at Columbia University the teaching of industrial ecology and in 1997 led the transformation of the historic School of Mines to the new engineering discipline of Earth and Environmental Engineering and was first chairman of the new Department.Dr. Themelis is member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He is founder of the Global Waste to Energy Research and Technology Council (WTERT), an international consortium of universities, companies and governmental organizations concerned with the recovery of energy and materials from municipal and industrial wastes. WTERT is advancing and promoting the recovery of energy and materials from commercial and municipal solid wastes, instead of landfilling them. Since 2004, Prof. Themelis has directed a bi-annual survey of the generation and disposition of municipal solid wastes in the U.S. He is the recipient of several professional awards and author of nearly 200 technical papers and books on the thermal processing of materials.
