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Philipp Adelhelm is a physical chemist and works at the interface between the research disciplines of materials science and electrochemistry. His current main interest is research on sustainable batteries.

After studying materials science at the University of Stuttgart, he moved to the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam (Department of Prof. Antionetti / Smarsly, 2005-2007) for his doctoral project. This was followed by a 2-year postdoctoral stay at the University of Utrecht (Prof. de Jongh) and then a position as a junior research group leader at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen (Prof. Janek, 2009-2015). From 2015-2019 he was a professor at the Institute for Technical Chemistry and Environmental Chemistry at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

He has been a professor at the Institute for Chemistry at Humboldt-University since 2019 and heads a joint research group on operando battery analysis at the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB).

Throughout his career, Jens has worked with successfully designing and developing complex experiments for in situ structural studies in the fields of polymer solar cells and functional organic materials, catalysis and hydrogen storage using synchrotron radiation, in fact since the beginning of his PhD studies. From 2001-2010 his focus was mainly on synchrotron radiation scattering techniques and their use for in situ experiments and for determining structure-property relations in functional thin films.

In 2011, Jens shifted his focus towards synchrotron-based 3D imaging of energy materials, particularly the very demanding case of polymer solar cells, where the low-contrast soft matter constitute a specific challenge. Through a dedicated effort of synchrotron experiments this led from 3D ptychographic imaging of roll to roll coated polymer solar cell active layers to 3D imaging of a complete polymer tandem solar cell. The scope of applications is all the time broadening, and Jens is now developing new tools for 3D imaging and organizing training and teaching in these.

In the same period, he developed a new setup for fast mapping of nano-structure, crystallinity and texture in R2R coated thin-films, which is still being improved and extended. Most recently, he has taken up research in ultrafast X-ray scattering and spectroscopy applied to solar energy materials, using X-ray free electron lasers.

In parallel with the studies of nano-structure in energy materials, Jens is running a small group that works with upscaling of organic solar cells, in order to maintain research into the entire development of this technology, from the fundamental understanding of charge generation and transport, over mesoscale structure formation to the performance of the final devices.

ICREA Prof. Jordi Arbiol was born in Molins de Rei (Catalonia) in 1975. Having graduated in physics from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) in 1997, he went on to obtain his PhD in transmission electron microscopy as applied to nanostructured materials from this same university in 2001, earning the “European Doctorate” label in recognition of the project’s European dimension, as well as the university’s extraordinary doctorate award. He then held the position of assistant professor at the UB, before becoming a group leader at the Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona in 2009, as well as the scientific supervisor of this institute’s electron microscopy facility. It was here that he began his personal and professional mission to improve Barcelona’s baseline electron microscopy infrastructure, an endeavour he has continued to pursue at the ICN2, which he joined in 2015 as the leader of the Advanced Electron Nanoscopy Group.

He was President of the Spanish Microscopy Society (SME) (2017-2021), Vice-president (2013-2017) and member of its Executive Board (2009-2021). In 2019 he became a Member of the Executive Board of the International Federation of Societies for Microscopy (IFSM) (2019-2027). He is member of the Research Committee at the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST) and scientific supervisor of Electron Microscopy at ICN2 and the ALBA Synchrotron EM Center.

Other recognitions include the FWO Commemorative Medal in 2021, the BIST Ignite Award in 2018, the 2014 EU40 Materials Prize (E-MRS), the 2014 EMS Outstanding Paper Award and being listed in the Top 40 under 40 Power List (2014) by The Analytical Scientist. He currently has more than 410 peer-reviewed publications, h-index 87 GoS (76 WoS), with more than 24,400 GoS (19,000 WoS) citations.

Rosa Arrigo (WoS Researcher ID L-6676-2016) is lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Salford in Manchester (UK) and honorary research scientist at the UK’ s synchrotron facility Diamond Light Source. Her research interests are focused on the design of innovative processes and nanostructured systems for decarbonization technologies in green chemistry and energy storage and conversion. Her research strategy consists of establishing molecular level structure-function relationships through the controlled synthesis of tailored materials, testing and thorough structural characterisation, including but not limited to the extensive use of innovative in situ synchrotron-based techniques such as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy. Current projects focus the conversion of carbon dioxide and H2 production. Recently, she is investigating the host/guest chemistry in metal-organic frameworks for the delivery of Aspergillus derived drugs and in CO2 capture.

Selected Publications of Relevance to Catalysis Science.

Dynamics at Polarized Carbon Dioxide–Iron Oxyhydroxide Interfaces Unveil the Origin of Multicarbon Product Formation, R. Arrigo, R. Blume, V. Streibel, C. Genovese, A. Roldan, M. E. Schuster, C. Ampelli, S. Perathoner, J. J. Velasco Vélez, M. Hävecker, A. Knop-Gericke, R. Schlögl, G. Centi , ACS Catal. 2022, 12, 1, 411–430

Elucidating the mechanism of the CO2 methanation reaction over Ni/hydrotalcite-derived catalysts via surface sensitive in situ XPS and NEXAFS, G. Giorgianni, C. Mebrahtu, M. E. Schuster, A. I. Large, G. Held, P. Ferrer, F. Venturini, D. Grinter, R. Palkovits, S. Perathoner, G. Centi, S. Abate, R. Arrigo, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2020, DOI: 10.1039/D0CP00622J.

Operando X-ray absorption fine structure study of the electrocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide over Ferrihydrite on nitrogen-doped carbon, C. Genovese, M. E. Schuster, E. K. Gibson, D. Gianolio, V. Posligua, R. Grau-Crespo, G. Cibin, P. P. Wells, D. Garai, V. Solokha, S. Krick Calderon, J. Velasco Velez, C. Ampelli, S. Perathoner, G. Held, G. Centi, R. Arrigo, Nat. Comms. 9, 2018, 935. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-03138-7.

In situ observation of reactive oxygen species forming on oxygen-evolving iridium surfaces, V. Pfeifer, T. E. Jones, J. J. Velasco Vélez, R. Arrigo, S. Piccinin, M. Hävecker, A. Knop-Gericke, R. Schlögl, Chem. Sci. 8, 2017, 2143-2149. DOI: 10.1039/C6SC04622C.

Recent Press Releases

“Take a Tour of the Diamond Light Source” in Chemistry world,

“Carbon Dioxide Conversion to Hydrocarbon: Thinking Big to See Small Things”, Nature Blog and "Beyond the Paper".

Julien Bachmann studied chemistry at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and graduated with a Diplôme de chimiste in 2001 (with Carlo Floriani). He then joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA to obtain his Ph. D. in inorganic chemistry (with Dan Nocera, 2006). He moved with a Humboldt Fellowship to the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Germany to learn the chemistry and physics of solids (with Ulrich Gösele) and worked as a postdoc at the University of Hamburg (with Kornelius Nielsch). He started as an Assistant Professor position (‘Juniorprofessur’, W1) in physics and chemistry in Hamburg in 2009 and was appointed as an Associate Professor (W2) of Inorganic Chemistry at the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2012. In 2017, he was promoted to the Full Professor (W3) status in the framework of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Engineering of Advanced Materials’, and he now leads the Chair for ‘Chemistry of Thin Film Materials’ at FAU.

Prof. Bachmann obtained several teaching prizes. He was awarded by the European Research Council an ERC Consolidator Grant (2015) and a Proof of Concept Grant (2022). He used to hold an adjunct position as a Full Professor at Saint Petersburg State University (2017 to February 2022) and was invited to the Danish Technical University as an Otto Mønsted Guest Professor (2021). He is also a co-founder and director of the company Atlant 3D Nanosystems.

Jesús Barrio Hermida received his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Madrid, Spain) in 2014, where he got in touch for the first time with chemical research whilst working in the synthesis and characterization of Fe and Cu coordination polymers in the Inorganic Chemistry department.

In 2016, he obtained his Master in Nanoscience and Molecular Nanotechnology from the same institution. His Master Thesis, carried out at the IMDEA Nanoscience Institute entailed the formation of controlled assemblies of plasmonic building blocks and was directed by Dr. Beatriz H. Juárez and Prof. Félix Zamora.

Due to a scholarship in the Erasmus program, he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces (Potsdam, Germany) for pursuing his doctoral studies, and in September 2016, he joined the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Beer-Sheva, Israel) along with his PhD supervisor, Prof. Menny Shalom, where he obtained his PhD in May 2020. His doctoral thesis focused on the design of metal-free carbon nitride materials for photo-electrocatalytic applications.

In June 2020 he joined the Materials Department at Imperial College as a Research Associate for working along with Dr. Ifan Stephens and Prof. Magda Titirici in the design of hybrid metal-carbon composites for different electrochemical applications. In August 2023 he started his independent career as an Imperial College Research Fellow at the Chemical Engineering Deaprtment of Imperial. His research covers the synthesis of carbon-based materials for different energy-related scenarios.

Magnus Berggren received his MSc in Physics in 1991 and graduated as PhD (Thesis: Organic Light Emitting Diodes) in Applied Physics in 1996, both degrees from Linköping University. He then joined Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ in the USA, for a one-year post doc period focusing on the development of organic lasers and novel optical resonator structures.

In 1997 he teamed up with Opticom ASA, from Norway, and former colleagues of Linköping University to establish the company Thin Film Electronics AB (ThinFilm). From 1997 to 1999 he served Thin Film as its founding managing director and initiated the development of printed electronic memories based on ferroelectric polymers.

After this, he returned to Linköping University and also to a part time manager at RISE Acreo. In 1999, he initiated the research and development of paper electronics, in part supported by several paper- and packaging companies. Since 2002, he is the professor in Organic Electronics at Linköping University and the director of the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, today including close to 90 researchers.

Magnus Berggren is one of the pioneers of the Organic Bioelectronics and Electronic Plants research areas and currently he is the acting director of the Strategic Research Area (SFO) of Advanced Functional Materials (AFM) at LiU. In 2012 Magnus Berggren was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 2014 he received the Marcus Wallenberg Price. He is also the co-founder of 7 companies: ThinFilm, Invisense, DP Patterning, Consensum Prodcution, OBOE IPR, OBOE Players and Ligna Energy.

Dr. Verónica Bermúdez is the Senior Research Director of the Energy Center at QEERI (Qatar Environment Research Institute, part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) under Qatar Foundation). She is leading scientific and technological research, development and innovation at QEERI in the field of Renewable Energy focused in solar PV electricity generation and integration with special focus PV technologies and solutions for desert and harsh environments

Prior to joining the organization in 2018, she was Acting General Manager of the Technology Division of the Atsugi Research Center at Solar Frontier KK in Japan. She has also hold a position of Expert at EDF R&D, Senior Scientist at NEXCIS (start-up) and Head of the Optoelectronic Characterization Laboratory at IRDEP (EDF) in France, between others. She is in the Advisory Board of a number of entities and provides consultancy and high level strategic technology commercialization advice to global companies and small companies alike. The impact of her research has been acknowledged by the invitation to give keynote and plenary talks at different international events, as well as with the reception of several prestigious awards, including the 2007 International Schieber Prize, the Research and Development Leader of the Year from the Women in New Energy Leadership Awards 2022, between others. She is an Associate Editor in Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy also IEEE Senior Fellow and is actively engaged in promoting science among the youth, with a focus on STEM for women.

Dr. Bermúdez is an internationally recognized expert authoring or co-authoring more than 120 scientific papers in renown journals, including Nature, Nature Energy and Science in clean and sustainable energy and in particular in photovoltaic materials and technologies in the whole value chain. She has extensive experience in laboratory to industry technology transfer in the field photovoltaics in almost the whole value chain and in particular in materials development, devices and processes scale up, power plant operations best practices, reliability, degradation and impact of weather conditions on performance ratio.

Prof. Laurent Billon gained his PhD in 1996 from the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, France (UPPA) and his habilitation in 2005. He is a Professor of exceptional class and was deputy director of the Institute of Analytical Sciences and Physico-Chemistry for Environment and Materials IPREM (CNRS UMR 5254) from 2028 to 2022. He is now leader of the Bio-inspired Materials Group at the UPPA.

Prof. Billon is the coordinator and principal investigator of a large series of national and international research projects such as the coordinator of the H2020 ITN EJD eSCALED Project (european SChool on Artificial Leaf: Electrodes & Devices) with 10 partners from 8 European countries. He has authored 155 scientific publications in highly impact journals, 4 book chapters & 1 book editor, 35 invited lectures at international conferences and 20 patents. From 2016 to 2022, he was invited Professor at the University Immersion Program of Sichuan University (Chengdu, China).

His research activities cover 1) Synthesis of macromolecular designs by controlled radical polymerizations (NMP, RAFT and ATRP) or "click" chemistry; 2) Synthesis of organic colloids in a dispersed medium; 3) Surface chemistry and functionalization; 4) Development of macromolecular systems 5) Stimuli-triggered self-assembly in aqueous solution and self-assembly in bulk and thin film directed by the process for hierarchically structured materials; 6) Multi-scale characterization: from the local scale to the macroscopic scale, through the mesoscopic scale and the (sub) micrometric scale and 7) Biomimicry and bio-inspired materials/processes. The main applications of his research are dedicated to bio-inspired materials for cosmetic/healthcare (Christian DIOR, L’OREAL, CHANEL, Pierre FABRE, Yves ROCHER, SEPPIC) and since many years to energy solutions (CO2 reduction and green H2 evolution)

Jiangzhao Chen is currently a professor at College of Optoelectronic Engineering in Chongqing University. He is a member of the “100 People Plan” of Chongqing University. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Chemistry from Northeast Forestry University in July 2011 and in Optical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in June 2016, respectively. From September 2016 to February 2019, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Nam-Gyu Park’s group at School of Chemical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University. From March 2019 to November 2019, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Wallace C. H. Choy’s group at Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the University of Hong Kong. He has long been engaged in the research of new thin film solar cells. Focusing on the key technical indicators of power conversion efficiency, stability, cost and other key scientific and technical issues faced by new thin film solar cells, the devices are systematically studied and explored from the aspects of material design and synthesis, device preparation and performance optimization, fine regulation of semiconductor physical properties, solvent engineering, additive molecular engineering, surface interface molecular engineering, mechanism analysis, etc. A series of technical bottlenecks faced by the commercial application of such solar cells have been broken through and a series of innovative and important research results have been achieved. Up to now, he has published 41 SCI academic papers in international well-known journals such as Science and Advanced Materials, which have been cited for more than 4000 times. h index is 19 and i10 index is 26. Among them, 35 SCI papers have been published as the first, co-first or corresponding author. 4 papers have been selected as ESI highly cited papers. 1 paper has been selected as ESI Hot Paper. The maximum number of citations in a single article exceeds 200. 9 papers have been cited more than 100 times. 19 papers have impact factors greater than 10, including Advanced Materials (4), Advanced Energy Materials (3), ACS Energy Letters (3), Nano Energy (1), Small Methods (2), Journal of Materials Chemistry A (2), Chemical Engineering Journal (3), and Green Chemistry (1). 5 invention patents have been applied. He presided over or participated in the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Chongqing Natural Science Foundation of China, Korea National Research Foundation, Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities, Overseas Returnees Entrepreneurship and Innovation Support Plan, Chongqing University hundred Talents Plan research start-up fund and horizontal fund. He has made 10 invited reports in important academic conferences at home and abroad, such as China Materials Conference. As the chairman/co-chairman of the sub-conference, he successfully held the "National Conference on Energy Materials and Devices", "the third International Conference on Clean Energy Materials and Technology", "the third Western Conference on Materials" and other international and domestic academic conferences. He is a long-time reviewer of more than 10 international famous journals, mainly including Advanced Materials, Advanced Energy Materials, ACS Energy Letters, Advanced Functional Materials, Advanced Science, Chemical Engineering Journal, Journal of Energy Chemistry, etc. He currently serves on the editorial board of Science Frontiers and Chemistry and Chemical Research journals, guest editor of Materials Reports: Energy journal, standing member of expert Committee on Energy Materials and Devices, and project evaluation and consulting expert of Science and Technology Innovation Alliance of Chengdu and Chongqing Twin Cities Economic Circle.

Majed Chergui is Professor of Physics and Chemistry at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Physics and Mathematics from Chelsea College (University of London), then his Master’s degree and in 1981, his Ph.D. in Molecular Physics from the Université Paris-Sud (Orsay). Thereafter, he spent six years at the Free University of Berlin (Germany), before moving to become in 1993 full professor of Physics at the Université de Lausanne, then to the EPFL in 2003.

He is best known for developing new ultrafast spectroscopic techniques and methods, which he applied to some of the most important problems in molecular spectroscopy and dynamics. In particular, he pioneered ultrafast X-ray spectroscopy and demonstrated its power for observing chemical transformations in molecules, solutions and nanoparticles, with femtosecond temporal and sub-Ångstrom spatial resolution. This work opened a new field of research which has influenced many international groups, especially at X-ray Free electron laser centers. Parallel to these achievements, he developed new ultrafast spectroscopic tools in the deep-ultraviolet (deep-UV), and in particular, he pioneered 2-dimensional deep-UV spectroscopy, with which he addressed electron transfer in proteins and charge carrier dynamics in transition metal oxide nanoparticles and solids.

With these various tools, he solved several fundamental questions regarding photoinduced phenomena in coordination chemistry complexes, in protein dynamics and in semiconductors, such as metal oxides. Among some of the highlights of his work are the description of the spin dynamics in metal complexes, the identification of solvation changes around photoexcited solutes, the unravelling of electron transfer processes concurrent with FRET in biological systems.

Chergui is the founding editor-in-chief of “Structural Dynamics” (AIP Publishing). He was awarded the Kuwait Prize for Physics (2009), the Humboldt Research Award (2010), the 2015 Earle K. Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy & Dynamics of the American Physical Society and the 2015 Edward Stern Award of the International X-ray Absorption Society.

is currently a professor of Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Dr. Choy has published over 175 internationally peer-reviewed journal papers, contributed to one book and five book chapters, as well as a number of US and China patents. Among his publications, 12 papers have been featured as cover-story articles such as Adv. Mater., Adv Energy Mater., and Chem Comm., and 14 articles have been highlighted in research new/scholarly articles. Details of publication can be found in http://scholar.google.com.hk/citations?user=GEJf9dAAAAAJ. He was the recipient of the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowship, the Croucher Foundation Fellowship, and the Outstanding Achievement Award from National Research Council of Canada and HKU Research Output Prize. He received overseas visiting fellowships from HKU to take a sabbatical leave at George Malliaras’s Group, Cornell University in 2008, a visit to Prof. Yang Yang, UCLA in summers of 2009 and 2011, Prof. Karl Leo, Institut fuer Angewandte Photophysik (IAPP), Technische Universitaet Dresden, Germany in the summer of 2010, and Prof./Sir Richard Friend, Cavendish Lab, Cambridge University, UK.

Wallace Choy is a fellow of OSA and senior member of IEEE. He has been recognized as Top 1% of most-cited scientists in Thomson Reuter’s Essential Science Indicators (ESI) three years in a row 2014, 2015 and 2016. He has been recognized as prolific researcher on organic solar cells in the index (WFC in physical sciences) in Nature Index 2014 Hong Kong published by Nature. He has been serving a technical consultant of HK-Ulvac (a member of stock-listed Ulvac Corp) since 2005. He has served as editorial board member for Nature Publishing Group of Scientific Reports and IOP Journal of Physics D, senior editor of IEEE Photonics Journal, topical editor of OSA Journal of the Optical Society of America B (JOSA founded in 1917), and guest editor of OSA Journal of Photonic Research, and Journal of Optical Quantum Electronics. He has delivered over 60 invited talks and served as a committee member in internationally industrial and academic conferences organized by various organizations such as IEEE, OSA and Plastic Electronics Foundation.

Diego Colombara is Associate Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Genova (Italy).

Educational background: Master studies in Italy and UK focused on solid state chemistry and metallurgy, with emphasis on phase equilibria, crystallography and alloys microstructure. Associate researcher at an SME (Fabbricazioni Nucleari Spa, Italy) dealing with semi-industrial scale synthesis of ceramic materials for molten carbonate fuel cells. Doctoral studies in the UK devoted to the synthesis and photoelectrochemical characterization of Cu-Sb, Cu-Bi, Cu-Zn-Sn and Sn chalcogenides for photovoltaic (PV) solar cell applications by electroplating and reactive annealing, as well as by chemical vapour transport, as part of the EPSRC-funded project SUPERGEN (2008-2012). The PhD was pursued at the University of Bath under the supervision of Prof. Laurie M. Peter, pioneer of semiconductor (photo)electrochemistry.

Professional experience before his faculty appointment: 5 years of postdoctoral research, teaching and supervision within the Physics department at the Unversity of Luxembourg (UniLu), including 3 years as researcher in FP7-funded project SCALENANO and 2 years as the Principal Investigator of GALDOCHS (a 453 kEUR research project funded by the FNR), where he discovered, studied and developed a novel methodology for extrinsic doping of PV semiconductors that made it to the news, by refuting a 20-years old assumption on CIGS PV technology. 2 years of Marie Curie cofund fellowship at INL (Portugal), where he is associated researcher, and he appears as the inventor of one patent on template-free microfabrication.

He is currently the coordinator of REMAP consortium (Reusable mask patterning, EIC Pathfinder Open grant no. 101046909; total budget: ca. 4 M€). https://re-map.eu/ https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101046909

Jeanne Crassous studied at the “Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon” (ENS Lyon, France). In 1992, she passed the national exam “Concours de l’Agrégation de Sciences Physiques, option Chimie”. In1993, she obtained a DEA (“Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies”, Master degree) in Organic Chemistry from the University of Lyon 1. She received her PhD in 1996, prepared under the supervision of Prof. André collet (ENS Lyon, France), on the Absolute Configuration of Bromochlorofluoromethane (CHFClBr). After a one-year postdoctoral period studying the Chirality of Fullerenes in Prof. François Diederich’s group (ETH Zurich, Switzerland), she received a CNRS researcher position at the ENS Lyon in 1998 and then she joined the Institut des Sciences Chimiques de Rennes (University of Rennes, France) in 2005. She became Director of Research in 2010.

Her group is dealing with many fields of chirality (metal-based helicene derivatives, chiral π-conjugated assemblies, fundamental aspects of chirality such as parity violation effects) and chiroptical activity (electronic and vibrational circular dichroism, circularly polarized luminescence) with potential applications in optoelectronics, spintronics and chirality-coded systems.

She is co-author of more than 170 articles and book chapters and has presented her work in more than 60 invited lectures and 65 seminars in laboratories. She is co-author/co-editor of two monographs: « Molécules Chirales : Stéréochimie et Propriétés », Editions du CNRS, 2006 and « Helicenes - Synthesis, Properties and Applications », Wiley, 2022.

She is currently coordinating a French national network (GDR CHIRAFUN, Chirality and multifunctionality) and a European ITN Project (HEL4CHIROLEDs, Helical molecules for Chiral OLEDs). She is also currently an elected member of the Executive Board of the DCO-SCF (Division of Organic Chemistry of the French Chemical Society) and member of the Editorial Boards of Chirality and ChemPhysChem (Wiley journals).

In 2013, she was elected distinguished junior member of the French Chemical Society (SCF). In 2020, she received the National Prize of the Organic Chemistry Division of the French Chemical Society (DCO-SCF). In 2021, she was elected Member of the European Academy of Science (EurASc) and Fellow of Chemistry Europe (Class 2020/2021). In 2023, she was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal in molecular chemistry (CNRS Talent).

Prof. Dr. Matthias Driess

Born: 1961 – Eisenach, Germany

Afﬁliation: Department of Chemistry, TU Berlin, Straße des 17 Juni 135, 10623 Berlin

Telephone: +49 (0) 30 314–22265

Email: matthias.driess@tu-berlin.de

https://www.tu.berlin/en/metallorganik

Scientiﬁc vita:

2005– Professor of Inorganic Chemistry (Metalorganics and Inorganic Materials), TU Berlin 1996–2004 Professor of Inorganic Chemistry (Cluster and Coordination Chemistry), U Bochum 1996 Professor at the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, U Freiburg

1993 Habilitation in Inorganic Chemistry, U Heidelberg

1990–1996 Junior Scientist at the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, U Heidelberg 1988–1989 Postdoc, Department of Chemistry (R. West), Madison, WI, USA

1988 PhD Chemistry (W. Siebert), Metalorganic Chemistry, Boron Chemistry 1985 Diploma in Chemistry, U Heidelberg

Fields of interest:

Molecular models of heterogeneous catalysts and bioinspired homogeneous catalysts; Molecular approach to heterogeneous catalysts for efﬁcient light-driven and electrocatalytic energy conversion (e.g., overall water-splitting); Organometallic precursors for low-temperature synthesis of nanoscaled metal oxides; Coordination chemistry for activation of small molecules and homogeneous catalysis; Development of multifunctional, low-valent silicon-based strong s-donor ligands in homogeneous catalysis

Awards (selection):

2016 Davison Lecture of the Inorganic Chemistry Division of the MIT (USA) 2016 Visiting Professor, ETH Zürich (Switzerland)

2014 Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities 2013 Member of the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina

2011 WACKER Silicone Award

2010 Alfred-Stock-Memorial Award of the German Chemical Society

Industry cooperations:

BASF SE; Wacker AG

Organizational activities (selection):

2016– Vice coordinator of the Einstein Center of Catalysis 2012– Scientiﬁc Director of the UniCat-BASF Jointlab (BasCat) 2007–2018 Spokesperson of the Cluster of Excellence UniCat

2017- Scientific Director of the Chemical Invention Factory (CIF, John Warner Center for start-ups in Green Chemistry)

2019- Deputy of the Cluster of Excellence UniSysCat

Publications (selection):

N. J. Lindenmaier, S. Wahlefeld, E. Bill, T. Szilvási, C. Eberle, S. Yao, P. Hildebrandt, M. Horch, I. Zebger, M. Driess, An S-oxygenated [NiFe] complex modelling sulfenate intermediates of an O2- tolerant hydrogenase, Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2017, 56, 2208–2211.

Y. Wang, A. Kostenko, S. Yao, M. Driess, Divalent Silicon-Assisted Activation of Dihydrogen in a Bis(N-heterocyclic silylene)xanthene Nickel(0) Complex for Efficient Catalytic Hydrogenation of Olefins, Journal of the American Chemical Society 2017, 139, 13499-13506.

A. Indra, P. W. Menezes, K. Kailasam, D. Hollmann, P. StrasserM. Schröder, A. Thomas, A. Brückner, M. Driess, Nickel as a co-catalyst for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution on graphitic-carbon nitride (sg-CN): what is the nature of the active species?, Chem. Commun. 2016, 52, 104-107.

Yao, F. Meier, N. Lindenmaier, R. Rudolph, B. Blom, M. Adelhardt, J. Sutter, S. Mebs, M. Haumann, K. Meyer, M. Kaupp, M. Driess, Biomimetic [2Fe-2S] clusters with extensively delocalized mixed-valence iron centers, Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2015, 53, 12185.

T. Mätsenen, D. Gallego, T. Szilvasi, M. Driess, M. Oestreich, Peripheral mechanism of a carbonyl hydrosilylation catalysed by an SiNSi iron pincer complex, Chemical Science 2015, 6, 7143–7149.

P. W. Menezes, A. Indra, N. R. Sahraie, A. Bergmann, P. Strasser, M. Driess, Cobalt–manganese- based spinels as multifunctional materials that unify catalytic water oxidation and oxygen reduction reactions, ChemSusChem 2015, 8, 164–171.

P. W. Menezes, A. Indra, O. Levy, K. Kailasam, V. Gutkin, J. Pfrommer, M. Driess, Using nickel manganese oxide catalysts for efﬁcient water oxidation, Chemical Communications 2015, 51, 5005– 5008.

P. W. Menezes, A. Indra, D. González-Flores, N. R. Sahraie, I. Zaharieva, M. Schwarze, P. Strasser, H. Dau, M. Driess, High-performance oxygen redox catalysis with multifunctional cobalt oxide nanochains: Morphology-dependent activity, ACS Catalysis 2015, 5, 2017–2027.

G. Tan, T. Szilvási, S. Inoue, B. Blom, M. Driess, An elusive hydridoaluminum(I) complex for facile C–H and C–O bond activation of ethers and access to its isolable hydridogallium(I) analogue: Syntheses, structures, and theoretical studies, Journal of the American Chemical Society 2014, 136, 9732.

B. L. Tran, B. Li, M. Driess, J. F. Hartwig, Copper-catalyzed intermolecular amidation and imidation of unactivated alkanes, Journal of the American Chemical Society 2014, 136, 2555.

Since the 1st of October 2023, Sonia Dsoke holds a Professorship for “Electrochemical Energy Carriers and Storage” at the department of sustainable systems engineering (INATECH), University of Freiburg, she leads a group “Innovative Battery Materials” at Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) and she is member of the Freiburger material center (FMF).

At international level, she is “chair elected” for Division 3 (electrochemical energy conversion and storage) of the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE) one of the largest electrochemical community in the world.

From 2017 until September 2023 Sonia Dsoke was the leader of a multidisciplinary group at the Institute for Applied Materials – Energy Storage Systems (KIT, Germany). In the same period, she was the deputy director of the platform CELEST and a spokesperson for Research Unit A (electrode materials) in the Cluster of Excellence POLiS dealing with “post-lithium” battery research. Previously she led an independent young research group focused on designing novel electrodes for Hydrid Battery-Supercapacitors at ZSW-Ulm (Germany). She also had industrial experience at an Italian battery manufacturing company FAAM (in 2009) and she was a researcher at the University of Camerino (Italy), where she also obtained her PhD in the field of Li-ion batteries.

Sonia Dsoke was honoured with the Brigitte-Schlieben-Lange Programm Grant (2017-2019, Ministry of Science and Culture, Baden-Württemberg) and a Young Investigator Group Grant (2012-2016, Federal Ministry of Education and Research) within the framework “Energy Storage Initiative” she is author of more than 80 peer-reviewed papers (h-index:26, according to Google scholar) 1 patent and 2 book chapters.

Her actual main research subjects are the development of novel advanced functional materials for supercapacitors, lithium and post-lithium ion batteries, with special focus on tackling challenges of novel battery concepts such as Na, K, Mg, Ca and Al batteries.

Prof. Gianluca Maria Farinola

Professor of Organic Chemistry

Pro-Rector for Research and Innovation

Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

Adjunct Professor Department of Biomedical Engineering

Tufts University

Boston (Medford), USA

Vice President of The Italian Chemical Society (2020-2022)

Elected President of the Italian Chemical Society (2023-2025)

Chemistry Europe Fellow

https://www.farinolagroup.com/

ORCID ID 0000-0002-1601-2810

https://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/11144950/Great_People_Dont_Need_to_Show_Off.html

Gianluca M. Farinola completed his PhD in 1996. He was Assistant Professor from 1996, Associate Professor from 2003 and from 2015 he is Full Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Bari Aldo Moro.

He has been visiting researcher at the University of Muenster, Germany (2009), invited visiting professor at the University of Strasbourg , France (Institut de Science et d’Ingégnerie Supramoléculaire – ISIS) (2013 and 2014) and at the University of Angers and CNRS, France (2015) and visiting scholar at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University, US (2017 and 2018), where he was appointed as Adjunct Professor in 2019.

Roles in Scientific Societies and other appointments

From 2017 to 2019 he was the President of the Organic Chemistry Division of the Italian Chemical Society, and from 2018 to 2021 the President of the Division of Organic Chemistry of EuChemS.

He is presently Vice-President (2020-2022) and elected President (2023-2025) of the Italian Chemical Society.

From 2016 to 2018 he has been Consultant of one of the Italian Parliamentary Commissions.

He is member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Chemistry and Materials Science Department of CNR (Italian National Research Council) (2019-2022).

He is member of the Chemistry Europe Council.

He is also member of the International Advisory Board of the European Journal of Organic Chemistry.

He is co-founder of a spin-off company SYNCHIMIA s.r.l. of the University of Bari started in November 2008.

Research

Gianluca Farinola is a synthetic organic chemistry who sets up new methods to produce photo- and electro- active molecules, supramolecular structures and materials for applications ranging from organic photonics and electronics to biology.

In the last ten years his research has opened intriguing directions by exploiting photosynthetic microorganisms (e.g. algae and bacteria) and biological polymers (e.g. melanin, fibroin, lignin, biosilica) as sources of sustainable materials for future optoelectronics and biomedicine.

He is author of about 200 publications and 110 invited lectures in national and international conferences and schools, in Universities and Research Institutes.

He is PI of many national, international and industrial research projects.

He is recipient of the Ciamician Medal of the Italian Chemical Society and of the “Innovation in Organic Synthesis Award” of the Interuniversitary Consortium CINMPIS.

He has been appointed Chemistry Europe Fellow in 2019.

Elena received her PhD in Intelligent Sensor Systems in 2000 (Coventry University); she was awarded a Professorship in Pervasive Computing, at the same university in 2009. Over the course of her career, Elena has accrued a sturdy academic reputation in the area of Cyber Physical Systems - specifically smart sensing systems, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and the Internet of Things (IoT). She routinely engages with national and international advisory and grant awarding bodies in the areas of sensing and distributed energy solutions. She chaired (2007–2013) the UK Wireless Intelligent Sensing Interest Group (WiSIG) within the Electronics, Sensors, Photonics Knowledge Transfer Network and is an expert reviewer and assessor for the European Commission (EC), Leverhulme trust, UK Research Councils, Finland Academy of Science and other international funders. She is a full member of the UK’s EPSRC College of Peers and the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships Peer Review College and serves on the British Council and the REF2020 Panels. She is an EPSRC affiliated member of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) and was named as one of the Top50 Women in Engineering in the Guardian and WES awards. She is actively involved with the European Commission and regional government organizations to promote the knowledge transfer from academia to industry and society at large, particularly focusing on the use of sensing technologies for reducing poverty, increasing health, enabling social mobility, and towards the adoption of wireless technologies, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet to tackle global energy challenges. Her work is sponsored by the EPSRC, Innovate UK, Royal Society, European Programmes, British Council, Singapore- MIT Alliance and benefitted from direct sponsorship from industry (Jaguar Land Rover, Orbit Housing Association, NP Aerospace, Meggitt Ltd, etc).

Dr. Maria Gimenez is Principal Investigator at CiQUS, Ramon y Cajal at the University of Santiago de Compostela and Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham. In 2006 she received her PhD from the University of Valencia working under the supervision of Prof Eugenio Coronado and Dr. Francisco M. Romero on multifunctional materials of interest in molecular magnetism. She then joined the Supramolecular Chemistry and Chemical Nanosciences Group of Prof. Neil Champness working as postdoctoral research fellow for almost three years. In 2009 she was awarded with a two-year Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship in the Nanocarbon Group of Prof. Andrei Khlobystov at the University of Nottingham. In 2011, she started her independent career as Royal Society Research Fellow and in 2015 she became Assistant Professor of Materials Chemistry in Nottingham. In 2018 she joined the CiQUS, launching her project ERC-STG NANOCOMP supported by the Oportunius Program (Xunta Galicia). She is currently coordinator of a strategic research group on Condensed Matter & Functional Materials (MAT2). The research in her group is currently focused on the development and functional characterisation of hybrid metal-carbon nanostructures for spintronics and energy-related applications.

In the last 10 years her studies have included a number of firsts, including (i) the first demonstrations of a molecular rhombus tiling (Nat. Chem. 2012), a supramolecular bilayer at a surface (Nat. Chem. 2011) and unusual nanoribbons inside carbon nanotubes (Nat. Mater. 2011); (ii) the encapsulation of single molecule magnets (Nat. Commun. 2011); (iii) the controlled assembly of preformed magnetic nanoparticles (Angew. Chem., 2013,) and exploitation of electrochemical nanoparticles (Adv. Mater. 2016, ChemSusChem 2021) in hollow carbon nanostructures. She has discovered a new type of supramolecular fluid (PCT/ES2021/070659, ES2797556 Angew.Chem. 2021) and established a new catalyst technology (PCT/ES2021/070649, ES2796448) offering a unique opportunity to address recyclability & sustainability for cost-effective electrochemical technologies. She has directed four doctoral thesis at the University of Nottingham and 12 MSc theses. She has participated in 15 research projects (11 as PI).

During these years she has been granted different fellowships and awards: Spanish Ministry of Education and Science Undergraduate Fellow, Extraordinary award for highest Degree in Chemistry, Regional Government Fellowship for Doctoral Studies, Marie Curie Intra-European Research Fellowship, Royal Society DH Research Fellowship, ERC Starting Grant-NANOCOMP, Ramon y Cajal contract and a ERC PoC Grant-ZABCAT. In recognition of her multidisciplinary achievements, Maria was awarded in 2012 with a very prestigious prize (Emerging Investigator Award 2012) by the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry for outstanding and novel research (covered in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2012, 51, 51). In 2016 and 2017 she became Emerging Talent SRUK/CERU Award finalist for the impact of her studies on the development of materials chemistry using carbon nanostructures.

I am Principal Investigator at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste, Italy.

I was born in [Genova](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoa) (Italy) in 1974, I received my *scientific* high-school diploma in 1992, and I graduated summa cum laude in *Electronic Engineering* in 1997 at the [Univ. of Genova](http://www.unige.it) (Italy), specializing in *Biomedical* *Engineering*. In 2001, after I received a [PhD in *Bioengineering*](http://www.dottorato.polimi.it/corsi-di-dottorato/corsi-di-dottorato-attivi/bioingegneria/), with a thesis in Computational Neuroscience by the Polytechnic of Milan (Italy), I decided to move abroad to continue my academic training.

In the same year, I received an award from the [Human Frontiers Science Program Organization](http://www.hfsp.org) to pursue postdoctoral training in experimental Electrophysiology and Neurobiology at the [Inst. of Physiology](http://www.physio.unibe.ch) of the Univ. of Bern (Switzerland),

where I had the opportunity to work with Prof. Hans-Rudolf Luescher and [Prof. Stefano Fusi](http://neuroscience.columbia.edu/profile/stefanofusi). In 2005, I moved to the [Brain Mind Institute](http://bmi.epfl.ch) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne where I joined the experimental lab of [Prof. Henry Markram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Markram) as junior group leader.

Three years later, in 2008, I was appointed faculty member at the [University of Antwerp](https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/) (Belgium), taking over the

Theoretical Neurobiology lab as a successor of [Prof. Erik De Schutter](https://loop.frontiersin.org/people/132/bio), to extend its scope to

interdisciplinary research in experimental Neuroscience and Neuroengineering. During the period 2013-2015, I was also visiting scientist at the [Neuroelectronics Flanders Institute](http://www.nerf.be) at IMEC, Leuven (Belgium). Over the years, I received visiting appointments at the [Department of Computer Science](https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/dcs) of the University of Sheffield (UK) and at the Brain Mind Institute of the EPFL (Switzerland). In 2012, I received my [tenure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_tenure) and later, in 2016,

I was promoted to full professor.

From 2008 until 2019, I directed the Laboratory for Theoretical Neurobiology and Neuroengineering, founding in 2017 a new research unit on Molecular, Cellular, and Network Excitability research.

In 2019, I moved to the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste, where I became faculty in the Neuroscience Area and I started the Neuronal Dynamics Laboratory.

Giulia is Associate Professor at Physical Chemistry Unit at University of Pavia, leading the PVsquared2 team, and running the European Grant ERCStG Project “HYNANO”aiming at the development of advanced hybrid perovskites materials and innovative functional interfaces for efficient, cheap and stable photovoltaics. Within this field, Giulia contributed to reveal the fundamental lightinduced dynamical processes underlying the operation of such advanced optoelectronic devices whose understanding is paramount for a smart device development and for contributing to the transition of a green economy.

Giulia received an MS in Physical Engineering in 2008 and obtained her PhD in Physics cum laude in 2012 at the Politecnico of Milan. Her experimental thesis focused on the realisation of a new femtosecond-microscope for mapping the ultrafast phenomena at organic interfaces. During her PhD, she worked for one year at the Physics Department of Oxford University where she pioneered new concepts within polymer/oxide solar cell technology. From 2012-2015, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology in Milan. In 2015, she joined the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) with a Co-Funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. From 2016 to 2019, she has been awarded by the Swiss Ambizione Energy Grant providing a platform to lead her independent research group at EPFL focused on the developemnt of new generation hybrid perovskite solar cells.

She is author of 90 peer-reviewed scientific papers bringing her h-index to 44 (>13’000 citations), focused on developement and understanding of the interface physics which governs the operation of new generation solar cells.

Recently, she received the USERN prize in Physical Science, the Swiss Physical Society Award in 2018 for Young Researcher and the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics. She is currently USERN Ambassador for Italy and board member of the Young Academy of Europe.

More can be found at https://pvsquared2.unipv.it.

Weblink: https://people.epfl.ch/giulia.grancini?lang=en

Dr. Hadjipanayi is a research scientist at the Photovoltaic Technology group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Cyprus working on the investigation of the optoelectronic characteristics and photovoltaic performance of novel solar cell devices and her latest work focuses on the characterization of perovskite-based PV and measurement protocol development.

She has received her BSc in Physics (2001) from the University of Cyprus and her DPhil (PhD) in Condensed Matter Physics (2006) from the University of Oxford. Her employment record includes a Post-Doctoral Research Associate position at the Quantum Information Processing Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (QIP IRC), Department of Physics, University of Oxford (2006-2009) and an Associate Research Scientist post at the Energy, Environment and Water Research Centre of the Cyprus Institute (2009-2012). Her research interests lie within the area of fundamental and applied physics of novel materials which are promising for future energy-efficient technological applications, especially in the field of solar energy. More specifically and more recently, these include: Investigation of optoelectronic properties and degradation mechanisms of novel solar cell devices including multi-junction solar cells, nanostructured silicon cells, perovskites; Development of accurate standardized and non-standardised testing protocols for new solar cell technologies.

Maria has over 10 years’ experience in national and European research projects as a partner and as a Coordinator covering the full project life-cycle involvement: from initiation to implementation, monitoring and reporting. She led the efforts to attract funds and develop a new strategic infrastructure unit at the University of Cyprus, the DegradationLab, which focuses in the accurate characterization of new and emerging solar cells, and is currently the Head of this new lab (https://fosscy.eu/laboratories/degradation-lab/).

Professor Peter Head CBE FREng FRSA Chairman and Founder of Resilience Brokers Ltd, Visiting Professor University of Bristol in sustainable systems engineering.

Peter is a civil and structural engineer who has become a recognised world leader in major bridges, advanced composite technology and in sustainable development in cities and regions.

In 2008 he was named by the Guardian Newspaper as one of 50 people that could ‘save the planet’.

He was cited by Time magazine in 2008 as one of 30 global eco-heroes and has been one of CNN’s Principle Voices.

In 2011 he was awarded the CBE in the New Year’s Honours List for services to Civil Engineering and the Environment.

In April 2011 he left Arup to set up The Ecological Sequestration Trust, a Charity which has brought together the world’s top scientists, engineers, economists, financiers, health, ecology and other specialists to create, demonstrate and scale a CHEER (Collaborative Human-Ecological-Economics-Resource systems) GIS platform to enable regions all over the world to plan, design and implement inclusive resilient growth using low carbon urban-rural development approaches which are energy, water and food secure. The first prototype was tested in Accra Ghana in 2016 and Peter is now leading a plan in Resilience Brokers Ltd with global partners to develop it fully and roll it out to 200 city region demonstrators in most countries by 2025.

Peter was a member of SDSN Thematic Group 9 that wrote and lobbied successfully for an urban SDG, SDG11.

Peter was one of the authors of the Planetary Health Commission 2015 Report on Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Era. He was also one of the authors of the Royal Society Report on Resilience to Extreme Weather 2015. He was editor of Roadmap 2030 an action plan for financing SDG delivery in cities including the key role of the Faiths. This was presented at Habitat III in Quito as the New Urban Agenda was launched.

He is a member of the UNDRR GAR 19/22 Advisory Board and a member of the Global Risk Assessment Framework GRAF working group.

Peter was a member of the Swansea University SPECIFIC advisory board until 2019 when he became the Chair of the associated SUNRISE Advisory Board.

Peter is a champion of sustainable development. He established the Ecological Sequestration Trust in 2011. He advocates that changing the way we invest public and private money in the built environment could be made very much more effective if the public and private sectors adopt sustainable development principles.

Peter is a civil and structural engineer who has become a recognised world leader in major bridges (he received an OBE for successfully delivering the Second Severn Crossing as Government Agent), advanced composite technology and now in sustainable development in cities and regions. He has won many awards for his work including the Award of Merit of IABSE, the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Silver Medal and the Prince Philip Award for Polymers in the Service of Mankind.

He joined Arup in 2004 to create and lead their planning and integrated urbanism team which by 2011 had doubled in size. He directed work on the Dongtan Eco City Planning project which was voted by Chinese developers in 2005 as the most influential development project in China.

In July 2008 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in engineering at Bristol University, where he is a visiting Professor in Sustainable Systems Engineering.

In May 2011 he was appointed as a visiting professor in eco-cities at Westminster University. In 2009 he was awarded the Sir Frank Whittle medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering for a lifetime contribution to the well-being of the nation through environmental innovation.

In 2008 he was named by the Guardian Newspaper as one of 50 people that could ‘save the planet’.

He was cited by Time magazine in 2008 as one of 30 global eco-heroes and has been one of CNN’s Principle Voices.

In 2011 he was awarded the CBE in the New Year’s Honours List for services to Civil Engineering and the Environment.

Awarded the CEMEX global lifetime achievement award in 2016

In 2011 he founded The Ecological Sequestration Trust and in 2016 the operating company Resilience Brokers. In 2020 he co-founded Pivot Projects.

He chairs Groundwork South Trustee Board and SUNRISE Advisory Board.

Prashant K. Jain earned his PhD in physical chemistry working with M. A. El-Sayed at Georgia Tech, following which he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. After a Miller Fellowship at UC Berkeley, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he is the G. L. Clark Professor of Physical Chemistry, a Professor in the Department of Chemistry, and a Professor in the Materials Research Laboratory. He is also a University Scholar and an Affiliate Faculty Member of Physics and the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology (IQUIST).

Prof Jain’s lab studies nanoscale light–matter interactions and energy conversion. His noteworthy contributions are discoveries of plasmon resonances in quantum dots and plasmonic redox catalysis. His collective work has been published in over 115 papers and cited over 32,000 times. He has been listed among Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate Analytics and Elsevier Scopus.

Prashant is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. He serves on the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of the American Chemical Society and the Journal of Chemical Physics and has previously been an advisory board member of the Journal of Physical Chemistry and a member of Defense Science Study group (DSSG).

His work has been recognized, among other awards, by a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Leo Hendrik Baekeland award, the ACS Kavli Emerging Leader in Chemistry award, the ACS Akron Award, the ACS Unilever Award the Beilby medal, a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, and selection as MIT TR35 inventor and a Beckman Young Investigator.

Sung-Mo “Steve” Kang is a Distinguished Chair Professor Emeritus of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, UC Santa Cruz, Chancellor Emeritus of UC Merced, and President Emeritus of KAIST. He has published over 500 journal and conference papers, and ten books, and holds 16 patents. Before returning to academia in 1985, he led the development of the world’s premier fully-CMOS 32-bit VLSI microprocessor chipsets for telecommunication and computing applications as a technical supervisor of AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey.

He has received honors, including a multitude of best paper awards, the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame induction, Alexander von Humboldt Senior US Scientists Award, IEEE Millennium Medal, IEEE Mac Van Valkenburg Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society Award, IEEE CAS Society Technical Excellence Award, the US Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Technical Excellence Award, IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Technical Field Award, IEEE CAS Society John Choma Education Award, Chang-Lin Tien Education Leadership Award, and distinguished alumnus awards from UC Berkeley, The University at Buffalo, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Yonsei University. He served three full years in the Korean Air Force (the class of 111-gi) before entering and studying electronics for three years at Yonsei University. Under a student exchange program, he transferred to Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1969.

Dr. Kang is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a life member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology and a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering, Korea. He received his B.S. degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, New Jersey, in 1970, an honorary B.S degree from Yonsei University, an M.S. degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975, all in electrical engineering. His research interest includes modeling and simulation of semiconductor devices, memristors and memristive systems, low-power VLSI circuit design, nano-bioelectronic circuits, and neuromorphic computing.

Head of the Laboratory of Solar Fuels at the Centrum Nowych Technologii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego. She obtained a PhD in Biological sciences in 1999 from the University of Warwick, UK. Postdoctoral research conducted in the group of James Barber at Imperial College London, UK led to several discoveries of novel molecular mechanisms of photosynthetic adaptation to changing environment (e.g. dissecting the molecular components of state transitions) and refining the crystallographic structure of the PSII oxygen evolving complex. Habilitation in 2009 from the University of Warsaw (UW). Since 2011 Associate Professor having established an independent research group at the UW. In 2011 Prof. Kargul established a node for solar fuels research in Poland and has led several projects on application of robust natural light-harvesting molecular nanomachines for construction of biohybrid solar cells and solar-to-fuel devices. She has extensive experience and success in leading several national and international initiatives (e.g. Founding Partner of ESF EuroSolarFuels and H2020 SUNRISE consortia; Member of Scientific Executive Board of SUNERGY large-scale R&I initiative) as well coordinating the international projects (e.g. bilateral Polish-Turkish consortium POLTUR/GraphESol and Polish/German/French/Turkish consortium Solar driven chemistry 2/SUNCOCAT) which have been focused on natural and semi-artificial solar energy conversion systems. She serves as the International Ambassador of the British Biochemical Society and serves on several editorial and strategic executive boards, e.g., as member of the Scientific Advisory Board of European Society for Photobiology, as Senior Editor of the International Journal of Biochemicstry and Cell Biology, member of the Grants Committee of the Biochemical Society (UK), expert of the NAWA programme of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, expert in NZ1 Panel of the National Science Centre, member of the Advisory Board of the European Green Deal, member of KIS4 Workgroup of Poland’s Ministry of Economic Development and Technology. Prof. Kargul’s highly interdisciplinary research spans structural biology, biochemistry, and plant physiology with electrochemistry, biophysics and material science. In her current research she focuses on structural and mechanistic aspects of the function and adaptation of the natural photosynthetic apparatus in extremophilic biophotocatalysts. She and her group apply this fundamental knowledge for the rational construction of biomolecular solar-to-fuel devices for optimised solar conversion, incorporating photoenzymes and various materials decorated with plasmonic nanoparticles.

Heading, ECOFIRST, A Tata Enterprise, subsidiary of Tata Consulting Engineers (TCE) since last 8 years. Chitranjan has played an instrumental role in the growth of the company and in its regional and sectoral spread. Ecofirst has delivered more than 600 sustainable projects and has grown 5 times in revenue and employee strength in last 5 years only.

Chitranjan is an individual who make a difference by deepening self awareness in relation to the world around. In doing so, adopt new ways of seeing, thinking and interacting that result in innovative, sustainable solutions. His vision is to deliver superior quality sustainable products and services to the community through innovations, leadership and partnerships. Chitranjan is convinced that technology is the primary driver of change, however, the change may not be limited to technologies / newer (futuristic) technologies, but also largely attributes from human behaviour, new innovations, political, socio-cultural or economic activities, which all shall lead to sustainable future for all.

Chitranjan is an intrepid person who can take calculated risks, more focused on execution and ground realities, optimistically pursue new opportunities, little bit thick skinned but not insensitive. Always prefer to prepare for future in professional and personal life, pragmatically inclusive and comfortable with variety of people. Good at team building capabilities and managing multicultural teams. Chitranjan has won Prof Wil Segeren Award in UNESCO-IHE as recognition for international co-operation amongst representation of participants from sixty countries.

Chitranjan is a Civil Engineer and member of Institution of Engineers in India. He has done master’s in water resources (Hydroinformatics) from UNESCO-IHE. Chitranjan has widespread experience ranging from working with government for over 10 years, for land development and Knowledge outsourcing works for North America and India. He is the key person at the inception of Ecofirst, which is the firm established in 2008 to push clean tech and sustainable development. Ecofirst is founder member of Indian Green Building council and Chitranjan is member of the Executive Committee. Chitranjan cherish a dream of making a sustainable Senior Citizen home along with child care and Autistic child care home at same place as mutual support for sustainable life and society building. He is freemason and love reading history and philosophy.

Professor Emma Kendrick, CChem FIMMM FRSC FIMMM - Chair of Energy Materials, School of Metallurgy and Materials, University of Birmingham.

Prof Kendrick’s career to date has included industrial and academic roles leading to her current role as Chair of Energy Materials, where in addition to group lead of the energy materials group (EMG), she is co-director of the Centre for Energy Storage (BCES) and part of Birmingham Energy institute (BEI) and Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials (BCSECM). The EMG investigates sustainability in novel battery technologies from materials, manufacturing, performance and parameterisation, and recycling. Her recent work has led to a 2021 joint UoB - Imperial College London (ICL) spin out company, based around the methods of experimental parameterisation of applied multi-physics cell models, called About:Energy, for which she is founder and director.

Prior to UoB, she spent two years as Reader in WMG, University of Warwick. Before academia, she led innovations in the battery industry, latterly as Chief Technologist in Energy Storage at SHARP Laboratories of Europe Ltd (SLE) and prior to that for two lithium-ion battery SMEs, Fife Batteries Ltd and Surion Energy Ltd.

She is fellow of the Royal Society of chemistry (RSC) and Institute of Metals, Mining and Materials (IoM3). Recently, she has been recognised through several awards; 2021 Faraday Institution (FI) Researcher Development Champion, RSC 2021 Environment, Sustainability and Energy Division Mid-Career Award, and the 2019 Hothersall Memorial Award for outstanding services to Metal Finishing.

Prof Kendrick holds a PhD from Keele University, obtained as part of a postgraduate transfer partnership (PTP) scheme with CERAM Research, a MSc in new materials from the University of Aberdeen and a BSc in chemistry from the University of Manchester.

Emmanuel Kymakis is Full Professor at the Electrical & Compurter Engineering Department of the Hellenic Mediterranean University, where he heads the Emerging Nanomaterials and Devices group. He received the B.Eng. (First Class Honors) degree in Electrical Engineering & Electronics from Liverpool University in 1999 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cambridge University in 2003. He and Prof. Gehan Amaratunga are the inventors of the polymer-nanotube solar cell. Before joining HMU, he was a technical consultant offering engineering and consultancy services in the field of photovoltaic and solar thermal power plants for various Greek and international investors and private companies. His technological interests are in the synthesis and solution processing of novel carbon nanomaterials and their incorporation into organic electronic devices. His research topics presently include investigation of the opto-electronic properties of graphene, carbon nanotubes, layered crystals and inorganic-organic hybrids for the development of low cost next generation flexible photovoltaic devices, compatible with roll-to-roll large area manufacturing methods. He has over 100 SCI publications with over 7.500 citations (h-index=43) on these topics and has given 40 invited lectures. He has been selected as an honorary lecturer in the UConn, and was a recipient of an Isaac Newton and an EPSRC studentship during his PhD studies in Cambridge. Prof. Kymakis was recently named by RSC as a 2014 ChemComm Emerging Investigator and has won the Excellence Award for young scientists by the Greek General Secretariat of Research & Technology. He is currently the deputy dealer of the WP Energy Generation of the Graphene Flagship and elected member of the General Assembly of the Greek Foundation for Research and Innovation (ELIDEK).

Bernabé Linares-Barranco received the B. S. degree in electronic physics in June 1986 and the M. S. degree in microelectronics in September 1987, both from the University of Seville , Sevilla , Spain . From September 1988 until August 1991 he was a Graduate Student at the Dept. of Electrical Engineering of Texas A&M University. He received a first Ph.D. degree in high-frequency OTA-C oscillator design in June 1990 from the University of Seville, Spain, and a second Ph.D deegree in analog neural network design in December 1991 from Texas A&M University , College-Station, USA.

Since June 1991, he has been a Tenured Scientist at the "Instituto de Microelectrónica deSevilla" , (IMSE-CNM-CSIC) Sevilla , Spain , which since 2015 is a Mixed Center between the University of Sevilla and the Spanish Research Council (CSIC). From September 1996 to August 1997, he was on sabbatical stay at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Johns Hopkins University . During Spring 2002 he was Visiting Associate Professor at the Electrical Engineering Department of Texas A&M University , College-Station, USA. In January 2003 he was promoted to Tenured Researcher, and in January 2004 to Full Professor. Since February 2018, he is the Director of the "Insitituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla".

He has been involved with circuit design for telecommunication circuits, VLSI emulators of biological neurons, VLSI neural based pattern recognition systems, hearing aids, precision circuit design for instrumentation equipment, VLSI transistor mismatch parameters characterization, and over the past 20 years has been deeply involved with neuromorphic spiking circuits and systems, with strong emphasis on vision and exploiting nanoscale memristive devices for learning. He is co-founder of two start-ups, Prophesee SA (www.prophesee.ai) and GrAI-Matter-Labs SAS (www.graimatterlabs.ai), both on neuromorphic hardware.

Dr. Linares-Barranco was corecipient of the 1997 IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems Best Paper Award for the paper "A Real-Time Clustering Microchip Neural Engine", and of the 2000 IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Darlington Award for the paper "A General Translinear Principle for Subthreshold MOS Transistors". He organized the 1995 Nips Post-Conference Workshop "Neural Hardware Engineering ". From July 1997 until June 1999 he has been Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Part II , and from January 1998 until December 2009 he was also Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks . Since April 2010 he is Associate Editor for the new journal "Frontiers in Neuromorphic Engineering", as part of the open access "Frontiers in Neuroscience" journal series (http://www.frontiersin.org/). Since Jan. 2021 he is Specialty Chief Editor of "Frontiers in Neuromorphic Engineering".

He is co-author of the book "Adaptive Resonance Theory Microchips ". He was Chief Guest Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks Special Issue on 'Hardware Neural Networks Implementations '. He is an IEEE Fellow since January 2010. He is listed among the Stanford top 2% most world-wide cited scientist in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (top 0.62% world-wide, 8th in Spain, 2nd in Andalucía, 1st in CSIC).

Prof. Magalí Lingenfelder is a PI with an excellent track record and a passion for atomically controlled interfaces. Her work contributes to the design of new materials by elucidating chemical processes by Scanning Probe Microscopies and Surface Sensitive Spectroscopies, including dynamic (bio) molecular recognition processes at the liquid/solid interface.

She created and led for over 10 years the Max Planck-EPFL laboratory for Molecular Nanoscience at EPFL campus in Switzerland, and has recently joined the Basque Center for Materials as Ikerbasque Professor.

She studied physical and biological chemistry at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. In 2003, she finished her MSc thesis at the Max Planck Institute for the Solid State Research (MPI-FKF in Stuttgart, Germany) with seminal contributions to the field of metal-organic coordination networks on solid surfaces. She continued with her doctoral studies in Physics, and received the Otto Hahn medal of the Max Planck Society in 2008 for the microscopic understanding of the chiral recognition process with submolecular resolution. In her quest to study molecular recognition going from 2D to 3D complex systems, she made postdoctoral stays at the Institute of Materials Sciences in Barcelona, and at the Molecular Foundry of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the US.

She is a committed mentor who directed 4 MSc theses, 5 PhD theses, and 5 postdocs. She advocates for problem-oriented interdisciplinary research, by pioneering the emerging field of BioNanoarchitectonics. She led 5 international research consortiums, delivered over 50 invited presentations, and organized 9 conferences and 4 doctoral schools. She and her team had received multiple awards and international recognitions for their creative and rigurous work on molecular recognition, chirality and operando studies at catalytic interfaces. In 2018, the Royal Society of Chemistry included her work in the first collection “Celebrating Excellence in Research: 100 Women of Chemistry”.

Antoni Llobet was born in Sabadell (Barcelona) in 1960.

He obtained his PhD at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) with Prof. Francesc Teixidor in July 1985, and then moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a postdoctoral stay with Prof. Thomas J. Meyer, until the end of 1987.

After a short period again at UAB and at University of Sussex-Dow Corning (UK) he then become a Scientific Officer for the Commission of the European Communities, based in Brussels, Belgium (1990-1991).

Then he was appointed Senior Research Associate at Texas A&M University in College Station (USA) from 1992 till 1993, working with the groups of Prof. Arthur E. Martell and Donald T. Sawyer. From 1993 till 2004 he joined the faculty of the Universitat de Girona where he was promoted to Full Professor in 2000. At the end of 2004 he joined the faculty of UAB also as Full Professor.

In September 2006, he was appointed as Group Leader at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) in Tarragona.

His research interests include the development of tailored transition metal complexes as catalysts for selective organic and inorganic transformations including the oxidation of water to molecular dioxygen, supramolecular catalysis, the activation of C-H and C-F bonds, and the preparation low molecular weight complexes as structural and/or functional models of the active sites of oxidative metalloproteins.

In 2000 he received the Distinction Award from Generalitat de Catalunya for Young Scientists. In 2011 he was awarded the Bruker Prize in Inorganic Chemistry from the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry (RSEQ) and in 2012 he has been awarded with the “Hermanos Elhuyar-Hans Goldschmidt” lecture jointly by RSEQ and the German Chemical Society (GDCh).

At present he is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of “Catalysis Science and Technology” from the Royal Society of Chemistry, “Inorganic Chemistry” from the American Chemical Society and “European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry” from Wiley-VCH.

Nicolò holds a tenure-track professorship and is the head of the ‘Ultrafast Nanophotonics and Advanced Functional Materials’ Group at the Department of Physics, Umeå University (Sweden) supported by the Swedish Research Council, the European Innovation Council, the Faculty of Science and Technology and the Kempe Foundations. Currently, he is also a visiting researcher and group leader at the Department of Physics and Materials Science, University of Luxembourg. He is author of more than 50 scientific papers in renowned international journals (including Physical Review Letters, Nature Communications, Advanced Optical Materials and Nano Letters) and co-author of an international patent on metamaterials for nanophotonic applications. He has more than 100 contributions at international conferences, international symposia, and colloquia, more than 25 as invited speaker.

Nicolò studied Physics at the University of Ferrara (Italy) from 2007 to 2012, and earned his PhD in Physics of Nanostructures and Advanced Materials (grade: outstanding cum laude) from the University of the Basque Country and CIC nanoGUNE (Spain) in 2016. As Predoctoral researcher in the Nanomagnetism Group at CIC nanoGUNE, he studied the optical properties of nanostructured magnetic materials, under the supervision of Prof. Paolo Vavassori. In 2015, he received the “Piero Brovetto” Award from the Italian Physical Society for “his contributions in the fields of nanomagnetism and nanooptics and the study of the physical properties of magnetoplasmonic nanoantennas and their application in bio-sensing”. During his PhD, he was Visiting Scientist at the Department of Applied Physics at Aalto School of Science (Finland) in 2014, and at the Department of Physics at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) in 2015.

From 2017 to 2018, he was Research Associate at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa (Italy) in the Plasmon Nanotechnologies Unit led by Dr. Francesco De Angelis, working on plasmonic nanostructures to control fundamental light-matter interactions, such as absorption and scattering of light, at the nanoscale. Concurrently, he contributed to the design and development of plasmonic nanoarchitectures for single protein sequencing through fluorescence and energy transfer mechanisms enhancement in collaboration with Dr. Denis Garoli, as well as for cell’s membrane and nucleus investigations through surface enhanced spectroscopy in collaboration with Dr. De Angelis.

From 2019 to 2021, he was a Junior Group Leader at the University of Luxembourg in the Ultrafast Phenomena in Condensed Matter Group led by Prof. Daniele Brida, leading a research team working on the FNR CORE Project ‘Ultrafast coherent hybridization of photons and spins in multi-functional magnetoplasmonic metamaterials’ (2020-2022) and the European H2020 FET-Open Project ‘Ultrafast Raman Technologies for Protein Identification and Sequencing’ (2020-2024). Here, he also developed a research line focused on the study of ultrafast phenomena in magnetoplasmonic nanostructures, and on the development of an ultrafast magneto-optical pump-probe spectroscopy setup working in different configurations (e.g., Faraday effect, polar and longitudinal Kerr effect, etc..), in a broad spectral range (from the visible to the mid infrared) and based on the use of few-optical cycle light pulses. In 2019 he was also Visiting Scientist in the Group of Prof. Alfred Leitenstorfer at the University of Konstanz.

In December 2021, he moved to Umeå University (Sweden) to start his own research group. In November 2021 he was awarded a prestigious Starting Grant from the Swedish Research Council aiming at studying nonthermal charge and spin dynamics in magnetoplasmonic nanostructures with sub-10 fs time resolution, and a Horizon Europe EIC-Pathfinder Project aiming at studying molecular structure by using advanced computational tools and ultrafast spectroscopy techniques together with international partners from Germany, Italy, France, Luxembourg and Sweden. Until now, he was able to collect more than 2.5 M€ (>25M SEK, including start-up packages) to fund his own research as Principal Investigator. In 2022, he became a Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe, an independent pan-European initiative of top young scientists for networking, scientific exchange and science policy.

Nicolò’s research span a broad range of fundamental and applied aspects of natural sciences, with a special focus on both the fundamental and applied aspects of light-matter interactions in advanced and multifunctional nano- and meta-materials for opto-electronics and information processing, photochemistry and biotechnology, by using frequency- and time-resolved (magneto-)optical spectroscopy, finite-element computational methods and bottom-up/top-down nanofabrication techniques (for a brief introduction on nano- and meta-materials, you can see his TEDx talk entitled Metamaterials matter: smart material of future).

From 2018 to 2021 Nicolò has been an Early Career Editorial Board Member of 'Nano Letters' (published by the American Chemical Society). Currently, he is an Associate Editor of 'Advanced Photonics Nexus' (published by SPIE and Chinese Laser Press) and a Young Editorial Board Member of 'Ultrafast Science', a Science partner journal published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and distributed by the American Associations for Advances in Science (AAAS).

Finally, Nicolò is a certified Research Integrity trainer in the framework of the European Project VIRT2UE, aiming to provide the knowledge and skills to conduct virtue-based ethical research and to foster reflection on scientific virtues in researchers, in line with the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. From 2019 until 2021, he was a Research Coach and a pro-bono consultant at the Luxembourg Agency for Research Integrity.

Tsutomu (Tom) Miyasaka received his Doctor of Engineering from The University of Tokyo in 1981. He joined Fuji Photo Film, Co., conducting R&Ds on high sensitivity photographic materials, lithium-ion secondary batteries, and design of an artificial photoreceptor, all of which relate to electrochemistry and photochemistry. In 2001, he moved to Toin University of Yokohama (TUY), Japan, as professor in Graduate School of Engineering to continue photoelectrochemistry. In 2006 to 2009 he was the dean of the Graduate School. In 2004 he has established a TUY-based company, Peccell Technologies, serving as CEO. In 2005 to 2010 he served as a guest professor at The University of Tokyo.

His research has been focused to light to electric energy conversion involving photochemical processes by enhancing rectified charge transfer at photo-functional interfaces of semiconductor electrodes. He has contributed to the design of low-temperature solution-printing process for fabrication of dye-sensitized solar cells and solid-state hybrid photovoltaic (PV) cells. Since the discovery of the organic inorganic hybrid perovskite as PV material in 2006 and fabrication of high efficiency PV device in 2012, his research has moved to R&Ds of the lead halide perovskite PV device. He has promoted the research field of perovskite photovoltaics by organizing international conferences and by publishing many papers on enhancement of PV efficiency and durability, overall citation number of which is reaching more than 5,000 times. In 2009 he was awarded a Ministry of Science & Education prize on his achievements of green sustainable solar cell technology. In 2017 he received Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ) Award. He is presently directing national research projects funded by Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Daniel G. Nocera is the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy at Harvard University. He is widely recognized in the world as a leading researcher in renewable energy. His group has pioneered studies of the basic mechanisms of energy conversion in biology and chemistry with a particular focus on multielectron transformations and the coupling of protons to electron transfer (i.e., proton-coupled electron transfer). A recent focus in the group has been to exploit this mechanistic knowledge for the generation of solar fuels.He has accomplished the solar process of photosynthesis – the splitting of water to hydrogen and oxygen using light from neutral water, at atmospheric pressure and room temperature at efficiencies of greater than 10%. This discovery, called artificial leaf, was named by Time magazine as Innovation of the Year for 2011. He has since elaborated this invention to accomplish a complete artificial photosynthetic cycle. To do so, he created the bionic leaf, which is a bio-engineered bacterium that uses the hydrogen from that artificial leaf and carbon dioxide from air to make biomass and liquid fuels. The bionic leaf, which was named by the World Economic Forum as the Breakthrough Technology for 2017, performs an artificial photosynthesis that is ten times more efficient than natural photosynthesis. Extending this approach, Nocera has achieved a renewable and distributed synthesis of ammonia (and fertilizer) at ambient conditions by coupling solar-based water splitting to a nitrogen fixing bioorganism, which is powered by the hydrogen produced from water splitting. These science discoveries set the stage for a storage mechanism for the large scale, distributed, deployment of solar energy and distributed food production and thus are particularly useful to the poor of the world, where large infrastructures for fuel and food production are not tenable.Other areas of interest in the group include the development of proton-coupled electron transfer and its application to radical enzymology, the development of new cancer therapies by creating nanocrystal chemosensors for metabolic tumor profiling, the creation of spin frustrated materials, which has culminated in the discovery of the quantum spin liquid, and the invention of molecular tagging velocimetry technique for the measurement of highly turbulent fluid flows.

Róisín M. Owens is Professor of Bioelectronics at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College. She received her BA in Natural Sciences (Mod. Biochemistry) at Trinity College Dublin, and her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Southampton University. She carried out two postdoc fellowships at Cornell University, on host-pathogen interactions of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in the dept. of Microbiology and Immunology with Prof. David Russell, and on rhinovirus therapeutics in the dept. of Biomedical Engineering with Prof. Moonsoo Jin. From 2009-2017 she was a group leader in the dept. of bioelectronics at Ecole des Mines de St. Etienne, on the microelectronics campus in Provence. Her current research centers on application of organic electronic materials for monitoring biological systems in vitro, with a specific interest in enhancing the biological complexity and adapting the electronics to be fit for purpose. She has received several awards including the European Research Council starting (2011), proof of concept grant (2014) and consolidator (2016) grants, a Marie Curie fellowship, and an EMBO fellowship. She currently serves as co-I and co-director for the EPSRC CDT in Sensor Technologies, renewed in 2019. She is a 2019 laureate of the Suffrage Science award. From 2014-2020, she was principle editor for biomaterials for MRS communications (Cambridge University Press), and she serves on the advisory board of Advanced BioSystems and Journal of Applied Polymer Science (Wiley). In 2020 she became Scientific Editor for Materials Horizons (RSC). She is author of 100+ publications and 2 patents and her work has been cited more than 6000 times.

Last update: 31/07/2022

Born on January 7, 1988.

During my undergraduate studies I had the chance to carry out two short-term research projects on nanomaterials at Tohoku University (Japan; 2010) and Université de Sherbrooke (Canada; 2011). I then obtained my Master of Science in Nanoscale Engineering and my PhD on Materials Science from Ecole Centrale de Lyon (France; 2011 and 2014). From 2015 until December 2017 I was a post-doctoral researcher in the Nanochemistry Department of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia of Genova (Italy). In 2017 I was awarded a "Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions" fellowship to develop my project PerovSAMs in the Instituto de Ciencia Molecular (ICMol) at the Universidad de Valencia, where I continued working with a "Juan de la Cierva incorporación" fellowship until 2021. In 2022 I joined Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena (UPCT) as a "Ramón y Cajal" fellow.

Throughout my career I have worked in the fields of materials' chemistry, colloidal inorganic nanocrystals, surface analysis and halide perovskites' optoelectronic devices among others. My publications and bibliometric indicators can be found elsewhere (e.g. Google Scholar or Scopus).

Aside from research I have also maintained a teaching activity throughout my career with lectures and practical courses in chemistry and chemical engineering at undergraduate level (Ecole Centrale de Lyon, 2011-2014 and 2020-2021; Universidad de Valencia and Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, 2018-2019; Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, 2022-present) as well as specific courses in surface analysis techniques for PhD students (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia; 2015-2017). I have supervised one Master of Science thesis, one PhD thesis and I currently supervise two other PhD theses.

Eventually, I am also involved in the "Federación de Jóvenes Investigadores" where we strive for a better spanish scientific and academic system, especially fighting against the precarity of young or junior researchers.

Anna-Maria Pappa is currently Asst Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Khalifa University and Visiting scholar at Cambridge University. She holds a PhD in Bioelectronics from the University of Lyon (2017). Prior to her appointment in KU she was the Oppenheimer research fellow at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at Cambridge University and the Maudslay-Butler Research Fellow in Engineering at Pembroke College, Cambridge. In 2017 she received the L’Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science award for developing an innovative platform that can be used to test the efficacy of newly synthesized antibiotics and in 2019 she was listed on the Innovators under 35 MIT technology review. Anna-Maria is an SPIE and MRS member as well as a Maudslay Society member. She is also affiliated with Pembroke College, Cambridge. She is an editor in Frontiers in Electronics, Scientific Reports and Biosensors, Mdpi. During her independent career she has served as Visiting Scholar in Cornell University (USA) and in the Institure of laser processes in FORTH Crete, Greece. In KU Anna-Maria is a member of the Healthcare Engineering Innovation Center, leading a team in biomicrofluidics and biosensors. Her current research interests lie in bio-integrated electronics, using polymeric semiconductors and synthetic biology to develop hierarchically organized biological models for point-of-care sensors. She has (co)authored more than 40 peer-reviewed articles, 3 book chapters, and has 1 full patent. She has delivered more than 32 presentations in international conferences (12 invited ones) and has given 10 seminars in leading Universities. Other professional activities include: expert evaluator of projects for EU-ERC, organization/chairing conferences (i.e., MRS Spring 2021), ad-hoc university committees and journal reviewing (RSC, ACS, Wiley) .

Angélica was born in Mexico City, Mexico. She received the M.S. degree in biomedical engineering from the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City and the Ph.D. degree in neuroscience from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, in 1999 and 2006, respectively. She first worked as doctoral student and research assistant at the Ophthalmology Clinic of the Geneva University Hospitals. In 2011 she joined the team at the Western Switzerland University Cochlear Implants Center, and became its head of engineering in 2013. Currently, she is also leads the laboratory of Audiology of the Division of ENT and Head-and-Neck Surgery of the Geneva University Hospitals. Angélica became lecturer for the University of Geneva in 2015 and senior lecturer in 2018.

The focus of her research is sensory perception evoked by electrical neuroprostheses (retinal implants, cochlear implants, and vestibular implants). Her early scientific work was devoted to investigating the fundamental theoretical psychophysical aspects of visual prostheses and retinal implants. Later, she had the opportunity to investigate these aspects in humans, during one of the first human clinical trials of retinal prostheses. Currently, she leads the research group at the University of Geneva performing the first in-human trial of a vestibular implant to rehabilitate patients with bilateral vestibular deficits (www.vestibularimplant.org). The main focus of this research is the investigation of the effects of electrical stimulation of vestibular nerve afferents in human subjects and the clinical significance of the rehabilitation that a vestibular implant could provide to patients suffering from a bilateral vestibular loss.

CCVV. Alejandro P�rez Rodr�guez Alejandro P�rez-Rodr�guez (Phys. Deg. 1984, PhD 1987) is Full Professor in the Department of Electronics of the University of Barcelona. In 2005-2009 he was Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Physics of the University, where he coordinated the installation of a new Laboratory of Micro and Nanotechnologies. Since October 2009 he is ascribed to the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC) as Head of the Solar Energy Materials & Systems Group in the Department of Advanced Materials for Energy. His research activities and interests are centred on Optical and structural assessment of processes in semiconductor technologies and on the development of new technologies for high efficiency low cost solar cells based on compound chalcogenide semiconductors and third PV device generation. He has coordinated up to 20 research projects in the National Spanish R+D+i programs, as well as 11 International projects funded by different European programmes (four of them as General Coordinator of the Project, from Human Capital and Mobility, FET-IST and, more recently FP7 NMP-Energy 2011, Marie Curie (IAPP 2011, IEF 2013) and SOLARERANET programmes), 5 bilateral cooperative actions between France and Spain and Germany and Spain, and 4 industrial projects. He is co-author of 318 scientific publications (including 160 papers in ISI international journals and 9 invited reviews), with an h factor of 29, and an average of 456 citations per year in the last 4 years and has supervised 8 Master Thesis and 10 Doctoral Thesis.

Nicolas Plumeré started his undergraduate studies at the University of Strasbourg, France, and after two years switched to Glasgow, UK, where he graduated with a honours degree in Chemistry in 2004 with a first class distinction. He continued his studies as a PhD student at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where he obtained his PhD with Summa cum Laude in 2009. After a short fellowship position as researcher at the company NECi, in the USA, Nicolas Plumeré became a group leader at the Center for Electrochemical Sciences, Faculty for Chemistry and Biochemistry, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany in 2010. Here, he has built up his own research group and was promoted to a tenured professorship in analytical chemistry in 2017. He was awarded the prestigious ERC Starting Grant in 2016, followed by an ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant in 2018. He currently serves as one of the PIs of the Excellence Cluster RESOLV from the German Research Foundation that started in 2019. He is strongly invested in his scientific community notably by acting on the council of the Bioelectrochemical Society and as an advisory board member of Chemical Science, the flagship journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was awarded the 2019 Luigi Galvani prize (which is awarded biannually to a scientist under the age of 45 who has shown excellence in the field of bioelectrochemistry). In 2018, he co-founded the company Silverbear specialized in point-of-use sensing for smart agriculture.

The Plumeré lab at the Ruhr-University Bochum has specialized in interfacing biocatalytic systems and electrodes for application in energ conversion and energy conversion schemes.. The expertise of the group includes organic chemistry for synthesis of redox interfaces, electrochemistry for quantification of electron transfer pathways, mathematical modeling for predicting photocurrent and electrochemical microarrays for biomolecule screening. Notable achievements include electrochemical sensing for aplications in precision agriculture and electrocatalytic processes for biophotovoltaics and biofuel cells

A/Prof. Pozo-Gonzalo is an ARAID fellow, funded by the Aragon government, working at the Carboquimica Institute-CSIC on sustainable energy storage materials and technologies. She attained her Degree and honours at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). After graduating, she received her PhD degree in Chemistry from the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) working with Prof. Peter J. Skabara on the electrochemical synthesis of Conducting Polymers. From 2004, she joined the Centre for Electrochemical Technologies in San Sebastian, (Spain) as the Head of Electrooptical unit where she stayed for 7 years. After moving to Australia, she has been working with Prof. Alan Bond at Monash University and in 2012 she joined Deakin University where she has been working in reversible metal air battery with advanced electrolytes, ionic liquids funded by ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES).

Since 2018, she has been focusing on circular economy in energy materials, working on the recovery of critical raw materials from end of life devices using sustainable methods, as well as redesign of materials for energy. At Deakin University, she is also a theme champion for energy materials as part of the University’s Circular Economy mission pillar. She is a board member of the Journal Sustainable Chemistry and Associate Editor of RSC sustainability. During her research career, she has authored and co-authored 108 peer-review international publications, 3 book chapters and holds 4 patents, in the areas of electrochemistry, circular economy and energy storage. She has supervised 11 Postdoctoral Research Fellows, 14 PhD students (9 to completion, 5 current), and 11 undergraduate students. She has led a total of 36 projects, 14 of them with industry partners, and 5 prestigious European funded projects within different calls STRP-FP6, FP7-NMP, RISE generating a total income of more than AU$4M.

Prof. Beatriz Roldán Cuenya is currently Director of the Interface Science Department at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin (Germany). She is an Honorary Professor at the Technische Universität Berlin, at the Freie Universität Berlin, and at the Ruhr-University Bochum, all in Germany. Also, she serves as a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Central Florida (USA).

Prof. Roldán Cuenya began her academic career by completing her M.S./B.S. in Physics with a minor in Materials Science at the University of Oviedo, Spain in 1998. Afterwards she moved to Germany and obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of Physics of the University of Duisburg-Essen with summa cum laude in 2001. Subsequently, she carried out her postdoctoral research in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara (USA) until 2003.

In 2004, she joined the Department of Physics at the University of Central Florida (UCF) as Assistant Professor where she moved through the ranks to become a full professor in 2012. In 2013 Prof. Roldan Cuenya, moved to Germany to become Chair Professor of Solid State Physics in the Department of Physics at Ruhr-University Bochum until 2017.

During her academic career, Prof. Roldan Cuenya received an Early CAREER Award from the US National Science Foundation (2005) and the international Peter Mark Memorial award from the American Vacuum Society (2009). In 2016 she became Fellow of the Max Planck Society in Germany and also received the prestigious Consolidator Award from the European Research Council. In 2020, she became a member of the Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe). She received the AVS Fellow Award (2021), the International Society of Electrochemistry-Elsevier Prize for Experimental Electrochemistry (2021), the 2022 Paul H. Emmet Award of the North American Catalysis Society, and the Röntgen Medal of the City of Remscheid (2022).

Prof. Roldan Cuenya is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, 6 book chapters, and 6 patents. She has given 245 invited talks, with 13 plenary talks and 33 keynote lectures since 2017. Her H-factor is 74 (Google Scholar) and her work has received over 21,500 citations.

She presently serves on the editorial advisory 