International solar fuels conference 2021

Harry Gray is the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and the Founding Director of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology. After graduate work at Northwestern University and postdoctoral research at the University of Copenhagen, he joined the chemistry faculty at Columbia University, where in the early 1960s he developed ligand field theory to interpret the electronic structures of transition metal complexes. After moving to Caltech in 1966, he began work in inorganic photochemistry that led to the development of light absorbers and robust catalysts for the production of solar fuels. He also began research in biological inorganic chemistry, demonstrating that electrons can tunnel rapidly over long molecular distances through metalloproteins. This discovery opened the way for work that shed light on electron flow in respiration and photosynthesis. He has received the Centenary Medal (1985); the National Medal of Science (1986); the Linderstrøm-Lang Prize (1992); the Harvey Prize (2000); the Benjamin Franklin Medal (2004); the Wolf Prize (2004); the City of Florence Prize (2006); the Welch Award in Chemistry (2009); the Othmer Gold Medal (2013); the T. W. Richards Medal (2014); the MacDiarmid Medal (2017); the Westheimer Prize (2018); the Cotton Medal (2018); seven national ACS awards, including the Priestley Medal (1991); and 22 honorary doctorates. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Philosophical Society; a foreign member of the Royal Society; Royal Danish Academy of Sciences; Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.

Dr. Pia Lindberg obtained her PhD at Uppsala University, Sweden in 2003, followed by postdoctoral work at CEA Saclay and at the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley. Throughout her career she has focused on engineering of photosynthetic microbes for generation of solar fuels and chemicals. She is currently an associate professor at Uppsala University, where her group is developing metabolically engineered cyanobacteria for direct production of terpenes and other useful hydrocarbon compounds from CO2. 

Ted Sargent holds the rank of University Professor at the University of Toronto, where he has been on the faculty since 1998. He earned the BScEng (Engineering Physics) from Queen’s University in 1995 and the PhD from the University of Toronto in 1998.

Originally from the United States, Prof. Sivula studied at the University of Minnesota, obtaining a Bachelor degree in Chemical Engineering in 2002, and at the University of California, Berkeley, completing a doctorate in 2007 under the direction of Prof. Jean Fréchet. He then joined Prof. Michael Grätzel’s group at EPFL as a postdoc, and in 2011 he began an independent research program in the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at EPFL, where he was promoted to Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering in 2018. He directs the Laboratory for molecular engineering of optoelectronic nanomaterials (LIMNO), and teaches courses in transport phenomena, chemical product design, and solar energy conversion.