Chemical Science symposium 2024: Materials for energy storage and conversion

Veronica Augustyn is the Jake and Jennifer Hooks Distinguished Scholar in Materials Science and Engineering and Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on the electrochemistry of materials for energy and environmental applications, including interfacial reactivity, ion-insertion coupled electron transfer mechanisms, and confinement phenomena. She is also the founder and faculty advisor of an award-winning international project, SciBridge, which develops renewable energy research and education collaborations between universities in Africa and the U.S.

Dr. Alexis Grimaud received his PhD from the University of Bordeaux in 2011 and is currently an associate professor in the chemistry department at Boston College. Prior to that position, he served as CNRS Researcher from 2014 to 2022 at the Collège de France, Paris, France. Dr. His research efforts focus on understanding complex interfacial processes at the heart of electrochemical systems, including water electrolyzers and Li-ion batteries, for which he is developing and studying novel liquid electrolytes with tailored reactivity that he is using to allow intercalation into novel classes of materials. Dr. Grimaud’s achievements were recognized by the French Young Researcher award as well as the Young Researcher award from the Energy Division of the French Chemical Society.

Prof. Marina Freitag, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Professor of Energy at Newcastle University, is a pioneering researcher in sustainable energy materials. Her innovative approach combines chemistry, engineering, and artificial intelligence to develop highly efficient and robust photovoltaic technologies. With her invention of the "zombie" solar cell and her ground-breaking work on self-powered IoT devices, Prof. Freitag is driving the transition towards a sustainable and intelligent energy future. Her contributions to the field have been recognized with prestigious awards, including the Göran Gustafsson Young Researcher Award and the Royal Society of Chemistry Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize.

Emilio Palomares, born in Valencia in 1974, earned his Biology degree from UVEG in 1997, followed by a PhD at UPV/ITQ-CSIC in 2001. He received a Marie Slowdowska-Curie Fellowship at ICL, London, in 2001, delving into molecular devices for energy conversion. Joining ICMol-UVEG in 2004, he later moved to ICIQ-CERCA in 2006. Notable accolades include an ERC starting grant (2009), ERC PoC (2015), and ICREA Professorship (2009). Palomares received the Young Chemist Award (2006), INNOVA 2010 Award, and the E2S International Chair (2019). Elected ICIQ Director in 2020, he secured an ERC Advanced Grant in 2023. Palomares has co-authored 280+ peer-reviewed papers, focusing on materials for energy devices. His group specializes in interfacial charge transfer reactions, particularly in solar cells for electrochemical fuel cell applications.

Prof. Sebastian C. Peter received his PhD in chemistry from the University of Münster, Germany (2006) and was post-doctoral fellow at Max Plank Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden, Germany (2006-07) and Northwestern University, USA (2007-10). Dr. Peter joined as a faculty at New Chemistry Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore in 2010. His broad research interests include the development of solid-state inorganic materials for fuel cell, CO2reduction and hydrogen production. He is the founder and director of the start-up “Breathe Applied Sciences Pvt Ltd” to translate the fundamental works on CO2 utilization. He is featured in the “75 under 50: Scientists Shaping Today's India” by the DST and the convenor of the first ever CoE on CCU in India. He is commissioning first ever CO2 to methanol plant in India. He received the National Technology Award, National Prize and National Start-up Award for his technology transition.

Yan Yu is a full professor of material science at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). She received her Ph.D. at USTC in 2006. From 2007 to 2008, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Florida International University. After that she received a Humboldt Research Fellowship and the Sofja Kovalevskaja award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and worked at the Max Planck Institute for Solid-State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. Her current research interests mainly include the design of novel nanomaterials for clean energy, especially for batteries and the fundamental science of energy-storage systems. She was selected as a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher in the field of Materials Science. She also received several awards and honors, such as the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, The 16th China Youth Science and Technology Award, Fellow of The Royal Society of Chemistry, etc.