Harsha Ratnaweera is a Professor on Water and Wastewater Technology at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). He is a full-time professor at NMBU since 2012 and an adjunct professor since 2001. He has worked at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) for 20 years as the Director of Innovation and Director of International Projects. He is also the Founder and Chairman of DOSCON AS with offices in Norway and China. Harsha has initiated and leading university collaboration network which now consists of 70 universities from 45 counties (www.WaterHarmony.net). He is a council member and the Norwegian representative at the European Water Association and a Fellow of the International Water Association. Harsha was born in Sri Lanka, lived in Kiev, Ukraine (1980-1987) while doing his MSc and moved to Norway in 1987 to do his PhD (1991) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. Process surveillance, process control, coagulation and circular economy in water sector are his current research priorities. He is fluent in English, Russian and Norwegian languages.

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He initiated NIVA’s innovation and commercialisation of R&D results. He is a specialist in conventional water and wastewater treatment. His special interests are process surveillance, control and optimisation of treatment processes and water resources management. He has led several international projects and worked in many countries in Asia, Africa, North and South Americas and Europe. He has worked in several projects in China and appointed as a Guest Professor at Qingdao Technological University, China, through the high-end international specialists’ program, and also an Honorary Professor at the Ukrainian State University of Chemical Technology, Dnepro.

He is a Council member and the Norwegian representative at the European Water Council (EWA) and a Director of the Board of the International Water Association (IWA), an also a Fellow of IWA. He has been the Vice-Chair of the Norwegian Water Research program (VAnnforsk), President of The Norwegian Society of Graduate Technical and Scientific Professionals – TEKNA’s Forum for Technology and Development, a member of the Board of Directors at the Norwegian Polytechnic Society and of the Nile Basin Research program. He was a member (2008-2012) and the Chairman of the Scientific committee (2008-2012) of the Norwegian National Commission.

Organizations

Norwegian University of Science and Technology- (NTNU)

Qingdao University of Technology (QTU), China

The Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), Norway

University of Peradeniya (UoP), Sri Lanka

Universty of Bergen – (UiB)

Projects

Nanowater

Water Essence

WH WaterJPI

ССWater

Publications

Chemical Enhancement for Retrofitting Moving Bed Biofilm and Integrated Fixed Film Activated Sludge Systems into Membrane Bioreactors

Inhibition effects of petroleum products on nitrogen and phosphorous removal

Morphological image analysis of biofilm evolution with quantitative analysis in a moving bed biofilm reactor

Insights into the Simultaneous Sorption of Ciprofloxacin and Heavy Metals Using Functionalized Biochar

Strategy for Flux Enhancement in Biofilm Ceramic Membrane Bioreactor Applying Prepolymerized and Non-Prepolymerized Inorganic Coagulants

State-of-the-art of membrane flux enhancement in membrane bioreactor

Multivariate Chemometric Analysis of Membrane Fouling Patterns in Biofilm Ceramic Membrane Bioreactor

Insights into the Simultaneous Sorption of Ciprofloxacin and Heavy Metals Using Functionalized Biochar

Double filtration as an effective system for removal of arsenate and arsenite from drinking water through reverse osmosis

Microbial community composition of a multi-stage moving bed biofilm reactor and its interaction with kinetic model parameters estimation

Particle and Phosphate Removal Mechanisms with Prepolymerized Coagulants

Explicit and interpretable nonlinear soft sensor models for influent surveillance at a full-scale wastewater treatment plant

Coagulation with Prepolymerized Aluminium Salts and their Influence on Particle and Phosphate Removal

Treatment of landfill leachate with different techniques: an overview

Image analysis of sludge aggregates

Spectroscopic surrogates for real time monitoring of water quality in wastewater treatment and water reuse

Hydraulic modeling and deep learning based flow forecasting for optimizing inter catchment wastewater transfer

Feed supplement recovered from dairy wastewater by biological and chemical pretreatment

Manage Sewer In-Line Storage Control Using Hydraulic Model and Recurrent Neural Network

Statistical monitoring and dynamic simulation of a wastewater treatment plant: A combined approach to achieve model predictive control

Climate change impacts on activated sludge wastewater treatment: a case study from Norway

State of the art of online monitoring and control of the coagulation process

Comparison of the coagulation behavior of different Norwegian aquatic NOM sources

Coagulation with Prepolymerized Metal Salts

Use long short-term memory to enhance Internet of Things for combined sewer overflow monitoring

A cost-effective IoT strategy for remote deployment of soft sensors – a case study on implementing a soft sensor in a multistage MBBR plant

Insights into the Simultaneous Sorption of Ciprofloxacin and Heavy Metals Using Functionalized Biochar

State-of-the-art of membrane flux enhancement in membrane bioreactor

A novel treatment process for dairy wastewater with chitosan produced from shrimp-shell waste