Interview with Prof. Chihhao Fan—Winner of the Environments Best Paper Award

We recently had the opportunity to interview Prof. Chihhao Fan about his paper “Fate and Impacts of Microplastics in the Environment: Hydrosphere, Pedosphere, and Atmosphere”, which was published in Environments (ISSN: 2076-3298) and has received a significant amount of positive feedback from our readers. 

The following is an interview with Prof. Chihhao Fan: 

My name is Prof. Chihhao Fan, and I am a professor with the Department of Bioenvironmental Systems Engineering, College of Bioresources and Agriculture, National Taiwan University, Taiwan.

I have been interested in the area of environmental engineering and management since my undergraduate studies. After completing my graduate studies in the US, I returned to Taiwan and worked for the government for two years. After realizing that technological development is critical to addressing environmental issues, especially in rural areas, I decided to join academia to build a career in research and education. 

Our research focus is to apply engineering technology to support the development of agriculture. My main research areas include the circular economy in agricultural waste management, pollution control in farmlands, and anaerobic digestion/fermentation for the recovery of organic substances.

3. In your opinion, which topics within the Environments scope will be most widely researched in the near future, and which could potentially yield groundbreaking advances?

Under the umbrella of sustainability, I believe the concept of “one health” will receive considerable attention since human beings can only thrive with a healthy ecology and a clean environment. 

“One Health” is a comprehensive concept that includes human health, animal health and plant science, and environmental health.

With the advances in innovative technologies, their application in environmental conservation would have an immediate and significant impact on establishing a sound and sustainable environment.  

To address the environmental issues that we are facing, we need to rely on advanced technologies as well as fundamental theories to find the best solution to achieve sustainability. The development of advanced analytical tools should be based on the applications of basic theories. Once the data were collected, further exploration and explanation should be conducted based on fundamental theories as well. Therefore, fundamental study is the key to further application in solving environmental issues. 

Publication is an important channel to share the most updated research and information. Academic Open access publication is an excellent platform for knowledge sharing without any barriers. It is a better way to encourage information sharing and scientific advancement. Again, the reviewing process is the most important part to minimize the unfair impressions towards open access publication. 

The use of AI can be a threat to the publishing industry. AI can be a useful and effective tool to integrate abundant information from literature. Unfortunately, AI may not have the full judgment capacity to distinguish appropriateness from inappropriateness. While we enjoy the effective and speedy operations to compile abundant information using AI, human intelligence (HI) may grow at a much slower pace.