Associate Professor Dr. Nur Awanis Hashim is an Associate Professor specialising in membrane technology and fabrication at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Universiti Malaya (UM). She joined UM as a lecturer in November 2004 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2011. Since then, she has played a key role in developing membrane fabrication research at UM, particularly through the application of the phase inversion process.

Before entering academia, Awanis worked as a Plant Engineer at Hitachi Semiconductor (Penang) after completing her Bachelor’s degree under the Monbusho Scholarship (now the MEXT Scholarship, Japan). Her academic training spans Japan and the United Kingdom, with a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering from Osaka University, a Master’s degree in Environmental Biotechnology from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), and a PhD from Imperial College London. She completed her secondary education at Sekolah Tun Fatimah, Johor Bahru.

In 2014, she represented Malaysia in the ASEAN–US Science Prize for Women competition in recognition of her work on membrane-based approaches to improving access to safe drinking water in the ASEAN region. Her research career has also been strengthened through international collaborations supported by the Hitachi Research Fellowship (2016), the Yamaguchi University Visiting Scholar Award and MEXT Global Networking Award (2019), and the JSPS Bridge Fellowship Award (2023), hosted by Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan.

Awanis received a special grant under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) in 2015 from the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia for research on disaster mitigation and flood prevention using membrane technology. She has been involved in 16 research projects and has served as Principal Investigator for 12 internal and external grants, with total funding exceeding RM1.5 million.

She is a Chartered Engineer with the Institution of Engineering and Technology (UK) and a Professional Engineer registered with the Board of Engineers Malaysia. She currently serves as an Executive Committee (Exco) member of JSPS–JAAM and is a member of the Board of Engineers Malaysia.

Awanis has held various academic and administrative leadership positions at UM since 2004, including Head of the Centre for Separation Science and Technology (January 2020 – December 2021), undergraduate programme coordinator, curriculum review committee member, laboratory coordinator, and departmental quality manager.

From 2023 to 2025, she was seconded to the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia as Deputy Undersecretary in the Policy and Research Division, where she headed the Research and Public–Private Research Network (PPRN) Section, comprising the Research Unit, PPRN Unit, and the Administration Unit. In this capacity, she was responsible for developing strategies and overseeing the implementation and monitoring of policy research, PPRN, and social innovation funding to ensure effective, value-added outcomes. She also coordinated research initiatives across departments within MOHE and represented the Ministry in matters related to research with other ministries.

Her research interests include membrane fabrication and modification, membrane-based separation technologies, separation processes, water and wastewater treatment, and carbon dioxide capture using membrane gas absorption. She has published more than fifty articles in ISI-indexed journals and regularly presents her work at national and international conferences.