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30 Jul 2026
6 Min Read
Ir Ts Dr Low Jiun Hor (Academic Contributor), The Taylor's Team (Editor)
Ir Ts Dr Low Jiun Hor, a senior lecturer in Chemical Engineering, has been awarded an Overseas Research Grant of JPY 400,000 by the Kurita Water and Environment Foundation (KWEF), becoming the first academic from Taylor's University to receive the award. The award backs a problem many Malaysians know only at a distance: the slow contamination of the rivers the country depends on, and the search for a better way to clean them.
The state of Malaysia's rivers gives the work its urgency. In 2025, the number of rivers rated clean slipped from 486 to 468 of the 672 monitored nationwide, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability. The decline is gradual, which is part of what makes it easy to ignore.
Oil is among the harshest ways a river can be damaged. A single contamination event can cut off water supply, raise public health alarms, poison aquatic life, and leave real economic costs behind for the communities downstream. The triggers are often ordinary: used oil poured away illegally, a pipeline or storage tank that fails, a tanker that overturns on the road. The Klang Valley shows that strain plainly. Its river basin is among the most densely populated and heavily developed in Malaysia, and decades of rapid urbanisation have left the Klang River one of the country's most pollution-prone waterways.
When oil reaches the water, Malaysia relies on a handful of established methods to clean it up. The most common are booms and skimmers: booms are floating barriers that pen a slick in and stop it spreading, while skimmers are the devices that then lift the pooled oil off the surface. The pairing works best in calm, contained water, and it is expensive to run, hungry for energy, and less reliable when the oil layer is thin or a current keeps moving it.
The other common response is chemical dispersants, sprayed onto a slick to break it into fine droplets that mix down into the water rather than sitting on top. That clears the surface, but it drives the oil below it, and the dispersant chemicals and dispersed oil together can prove toxic to the aquatic life they pass through.
Dr Low's project takes a different route, through materials science and engineering. The idea is a sorbent: a material engineered to attract and hold oil while shedding water, so it soaks a slick up like a sponge and lets the oil be carried away with it. Drawing on polymer chemistry and nanotechnology, he aims to build one that holds more oil, stands up to repeated use, and can be recovered and wrung out to work again rather than thrown away after a single clean-up.
The grant's sponsor, KWEF, was founded in 1997 by Kurita Water Industries, a Japanese company with more than seventy years in industrial water treatment and a guiding philosophy that runs close to Dr Low's own work: study water closely enough, and you can keep nature and human activity in balance.
Each year the foundation backs a small number of young researchers across Asia who are taking on the region's hardest water challenges. Selection is competitive and international, which is what makes Dr Low's award more than a line on a grant ledger. It is an outside signal, from an established name in the field, that the problem is worth solving and that a Taylor's researcher is the one to solve it.
For Taylor's University, the grant puts a real environmental problem into the hands of its researchers and students. Undergraduate and postgraduate students on Dr Low's team will work on the actual materials science and engineering behind the sorbent, the kind of hands-on research experience a classroom cannot manufacture, on a project supported by one of the world's established names in water treatment.
For Malaysia, the research sets out to tackle a problem the country already knows well. When a river is fouled by oil, the cost lands on the communities downstream: water supplies cut off, fisheries and wildlife harmed, and clean-up bills left for the public to carry. A cheaper, reusable material that can easily lift oil out of water would give responders a better option than the ones they have now. Proving that still lies ahead in the lab. What stands today is the recognition itself: a respected international foundation has judged both the problem and the researcher worth backing.
