Denys Villa Gomez

Dr. Denys Villa Gomez holds a joint appointment at the University of Queensland as Senior Lecturer in the School of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology, and Advance Queensland Research Fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. She obtained her PhD from the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Delft, The Netherlands. Prior to her current roles, she served as a docent at the National Polytechnic and conducted research at the Instituto Potosino de Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnologica.

Villa Gomez leads research in environmental engineering, specializing in biotechnologies for resource recovery and pollution mitigation from industrial wastes. Her interests encompass critical metals recovery, bioleaching from bauxite residue and acid mine drainage, sulfate removal coupled to elemental sulfur production, synthetic biology for microalgae-based pollutant treatment, and optimization of anaerobic digestion processes. She heads the Villa Gomez Group, an emerging team within the Marcellin Group at AIBN, and contributes as chief investigator to projects on microbial detoxification of mine waste to recover rare earth minerals and geophysical analysis of mine environments. Funding achievements include the UQ Early Career Researcher grant for 'Waste-to-value: selective recovery of Nickel and Cobalt from mining waste' (2019) and Advance Queensland Women's Academic Fund maternity support (2016-2017). She holds fellowships such as Advance Queensland Research Fellow (2023-2026) and is nominated for Women in Technology awards. Key publications feature 'Bioleaching for critical metal recovery from bauxite residue' (Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, 2025), 'Interactions of rare earth elements with living organisms and implications for agriculture' (Plants People Planet, 2025), 'Review on Developments in Technologies for Critical Metal Recovery from Mining and Processing Wastes' (Mineral Processing and Extractive Metallurgy, 2024), 'A synthetic biology approach for the treatment of pollutants with microalgae' (Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, 2024), 'High-Rate Sulfate Removal Coupled to Elemental Sulfur Production Using a Lab-Scale Inverse Fluidized Bed Bioreactor' (Frontiers in Microbiology, 2022), and 'Remediation and Selective Recovery of Metals from Acidic Mine Drainage Using Uranium Phosphate Precipitation' (Environmental Science & Technology, 2014). Her work supports sustainable technologies in mining and waste management.

Professional Email: d.villagomez@uq.edu.au