Steven Banwart is Director of the Kroto Research Institute, University Director of Research for Energy and Environment and Professor of Environmental Engineering Science at the University of Sheffield. He has a highly successful track record leading large, multidisciplinary research projects. He leads the Cell-Mineral Research Centre, with c. £17M funding held by around 20 academics in 6 departments with 30 researchers at the interface between pure sciences and engineering. In addition to leading SoilTrEC, he is PI of a NERC Consortium Project (€2.24M) with partners at U. Bristol, U. Leeds and U. Iceland on the role of symbiotic mycorrhiza soil fungi to weather minerals. His track record includes successfully predicting field weathering rates of rock and minerals from lab data, elucidating chemical models for bacterial cell surfaces, application of novel imaging techniques to reactive transport of pollutants and advanced computational methods to simulate reactive transport in groundwater. He is Secretary of the European Association of Geochemistry, Chair of the Steering Committee for the NERC Facility for Environmental Nanoparticle Analysis and Characterisation, a member of the EPSRC peer-review college and of the UK Nanotechnologies Environmental Risk Assessment Task Force.