On November 6^th, 2014, Prof. SUN Xiaoqi got ‘Highly Commended’ award at the ceremony of the Institution of Chemical Engineer (IChemE) Global Awards 2014. The title of his shortlisted program is ‘Sustainable and Efficient Rare Earth Separation’. As a professional institution for chemical and process engineers, IChemE founded in 1922 and headquartered in UK, has grown to its current status of over 40,000 members across 120 countries. IChemE is a prestigious international organization for chemical engineering, and it is the only organization to award chartered chemical engineer status. Please see http://www.icheme.org/media_centre/news/2014/awards-triumph-for-cyanide-production-technology.aspx#.VGAk6bK2fe9.

Rare earth elements (REEs) is a kind of critical elements, the development of novel separation strategy for REEs has aroused worldwide attention. REEs separation chemistry and engineering is a main research interest of Prof.  SUN Xiaoqi. By cooperation among the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Oak Ridge National Lab and McGill University, the acid-base coupling bifunctional ionic liquids pioneered by Prof. SUN have revealed excellent performance for REEs extraction and separation, together with increasing REEs percent recovery and eliminating industrial saponification wastewater. The novel technology contributes not only to REEs separation industry, but also to industrial nuclear fuel cycling and precious metal hydrometallurgy. The achievements mentioned above have been reported in many highly influential journals, such as Chemical Reviews and AIChE Journal.