Rate My Professor Emma Thompson Brewster

Dr. Emma Thompson Brewster is a Lecturer in Engineering in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Environmental Engineering with First Class Honours (BE, Hons I) from the University of Queensland (UQ). After completing her undergraduate degree, she served as a graduate engineer at the Queensland Department of Energy and Water Supply. From 2013 to 2017, Emma pursued her PhD at UQ's Advanced Water Management Centre, focusing her research on nutrient recovery from wastewater, which she completed in 2017. She then held an industry-based postdoctoral research fellow position from 2018 to 2019 at UQ's Sustainable Minerals Institute, designing a system for recovering metals from acid mine drainage intended for commercial development. Joining Southern Cross University in 2020, she now contributes to teaching and research in environmental engineering.

Emma Thompson Brewster's academic interests center on sustainable wastewater treatment and waste management, with a particular emphasis on single-use absorbent hygiene products such as nappies and adult incontinence products. Her research intersects waste, water, and wastewater management and treatment, resource recovery, electrochemistry, statistics, and mathematical modelling. Key publications from her career include 'Adult incontinence products are a larger and faster growing waste problem than baby diapers' (Waste Management, 2022), 'Struvite Production from Dairy Processing Waste' (Sustainability, 2022), 'Electrochemical Phosphorus Recovery from Anaerobically Digested Sludge: Improving Product Purity and Concentration' (ACS ES&T Engineering, 2024), 'The end-of-life of used pads in Australia – who is filling up the bin?' (2024), 'Staged electrochemical treatment guided by modelling allows near-complete phosphate recovery' (2020), 'A modelling approach to assess the long-term stability of a continuous flow electrochemical phosphate recovery cell' (2018), and 'A mechanistic model for electrochemical nutrient recovery systems' (2016). Through her work, she addresses pressing environmental issues related to resource recovery and waste minimization.