Energy materials for a low carbon future

Professor Henry Snaith FRS undertook his PhD at the University of Cambridge, working on organic photovolatics under Professor Sir Richard Friend, then spent two years at the EPFL, in Switzerland, as a post doc working on dye-sensitized solar cells under Prof Michael Grätzel. He returned to the Cambridge to take up a Fellowship for Clare College in 2006, and moved to the Clarendon Laboratory of Oxford Physics in 2007, where he now holds a professorship and directs a group researching in optoelectronics, specifically organic, hybrid and perovskite devices. His research is focused on developing new materials and structures for hybrid solar cells and understanding and controlling the physical processes occurring at interfaces. He has made a number of significant advances for emerging photovoltaics, including the recent discovery that metal halide perovskites can operate extremely efficiently in thin film based solar cells. His recent work with perovskite solar cells has transformed the PV research community, and arguably created a new field of research. Professor Snaith has received a number of research awards including the Institute of Physics Patterson Medal and Prize (2012), the Materials Research Society Outstanding Young Investigator Award (2014) and the European Materials Research Society EU-40 Materials Prize (2015) and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015. In addition to awards, he was named one of “Natures Ten” people who mattered in 2013, and assessed as being the world’s 2nd most influential scientific mind in 2016, based on citations of his seminal scientific papers on perovskite solar cells. In December 2010 he founded Oxford Photovoltaics Ltd. which is rapidly commercializing the perovskite solar technology transferred from his University Laboratory.

Jean-Marie Tarascon (1953) is  Professor at the College de France holding  the chair “Chemistry of solids – Energy). But much of his early career was spent in the United States where he developed (1994) the  plastic Li-ion technology. Back to France in 1995, he created the European network of excellence ALISTORE-ERI of which he was head until 2010 prior tobecame in charge of the recently created French network on electrochemical energy storage (RS2E). Tarascon’s  present research is  devoted to Li-ion, Na-ion batteries and other chemistries with emphasis on developing new eco-efficient synthesis processes and developing novel reactivity concepts. He is the author of more than 650 scientific papers, and detains about 85 patents. He received many honours, with the last ones in 2017 being the CNRS innovation medal, the Galvani medal and the Eric and Sheila Samson Prime Minister’s Prize. 

Sossina M Haile is the Walter P Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, a position she assumed in 2015 after serving 18 years on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology. She earned her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. Haile’s research broadly encompasses solid state ionic materials and electrochemical devices, with particular focus on energy technologies. Amongst her many awards, in 2008 Haile received an American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellowship from the US National Science Foundation in recognition of “her timely and transformative research in the energy field and her dedication to inclusive mentoring, education and outreach across many levels.” She is a fellow of the Materials Research Society, the African Academy of Sciences, and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, and serves on the editorial boards of Materials Horizons and Annual Review of Materials Research.

Jim Skea has research interests in energy, climate change and technological innovation. He has been RCUK Energy Strategy Fellow since April 2012 and a Professor of Sustainable Energy at Imperial College since 2009. He was Research Director of the UK Energy Research Centre 2004-12, Director of the Policy Studies Institute 1998-2004, and President of the UK Energy Institute 2015-2017. Jim has operated at the interface between research, policy-making and business throughout his career. He is also a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change and Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III for the 6th assessment cycle. He was awarded a CBE for services to sustainable energy in 2013 and an OBE for services to sustainable transport in 2004. 

Laura Herz is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at Brasenose College. She received her PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge in 2002 and was a Research Fellow at St John's College Cambridge from 2001 - 2003 after which she moved to Oxford. Her research interests lie in the area of organic and organic/inorganic hybrid semiconductors including aspects such as self-assembly, nano-scale effects, energy-transfer and light-harvesting for solar energy conversion. 

Clare P. Grey is the Geoffrey Moorhouse-Gibson Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Pembroke College Cambridge.  She received a BA and D. Phil. (1991) in Chemistry from the University of Oxford.  After post-doctoral fellowships in the Netherlands and at DuPont CR&D in Wilmington, DE, she joined the faculty at Stony Brook University (SBU) as an Assistant (1994), Associate (1997) and then Full Professor (2001-2015).  She moved to Cambridge in 2009, maintaining an adjunct position at SBU.  She was director (2009-2010) and associate director (2011-2014) of the Northeastern Chemical Energy Storage Center, a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center.  Recent honors/awards include the Research Award from the International Battery Association (2013), the Royal Society Davy Award (2014), the Arfvedson-Schlenk-Preis from the German Chemical Society (2015), the Société Chimique de France, French-British Prize (2017) and the International Solid State Ionics Galvani-Nernst-Wagner Mid-Career Award (2017) -  of which she is the first recipient. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2017 has been elected as a Foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and Fellow of the Electrochemical Society. Her current research interests include the use of solid state NMR and diffraction-based methods to determine structure-function relationships in materials for energy storage (batteries and supercapacitors), conversion (fuel cells) and carbon capture.

Mercouri G Kanatzidis was born in Thessaloniki Greece in 1957. He has a Bachelor of Science degree from Aristotle University in Greece. He received his PhD degree in chemistry from the University of Iowa in 1984. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University from 1985 to 1987. He currently is a Charles E and Emma H Morrison Professor in Chemistry at Northwestern University.

Kanatzidis has been named a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation, an Alfred P Sloan Fellow, a Beckman Young Investigator, a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teaching Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow and in 2003 was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize. In 2014 he received the Einstein Professor Award, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the International Thermoelectric Society Outstanding Achievement Award; and the MRS Medal. In 2016 he also won the  Samson Prime Minister's Prize for Innovation in Alternative Fuels for Transportation, 2016 American Chemical Society’s James C McGroddy Prize for New Materials, American Chemical Society’s Award in Inorganic Chemistry and in 2015 the ENI Award for the "Renewable Energy Prize" and Royal Chemical Society’s De Gennes Prize.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Thomas Kirchartz is currently a professor of electrical engineering and information technology at the University Duisburg-Essen and the head of the department of analytics and simulation and the group of organic and hybrid solar cells at the Research Centre Jülich (Institute for Energy and Climate Research). Previously he was a Junior Research Fellow at Imperial College London. His research interests are all aspects regarding the fundamental understanding of photovoltaic devices including their characterization and simulation.

Jürgen Janek holds a chair for Physical Chemistry at Justus-Liebig University in Giessen (Germany) and is scientific director of BELLA, a joint lab of BASF SE and KIT in Karlsruhe/Germany. He received his doctoral degree in the field of physical chemistry of solids under supervision of Hermann Schmalzried and Alan B Lidiard. He was visiting professor at Seoul National University, Tohuku University/Sendai and Université d´Aix-Marseille, and got several awards for his scientific work. His research in physical chemistry of solids and electrochemistry spans a wide range from fundamental transport studies in mixed conductors and interface phenomena to in situ studies in electrochemical cells. Current key interests include all-solid state batteries, lithium- and sodium-based batteries and new solid electrolytes. He is particularly interested in kinetics at interfaces and in in situ techniques. Jürgen Janek holds 12 patents and is author of about 300 peer-reviewed papers in a wide range of journals.

Linda Nazar, FRSC, is a Senior Canada Research Chair in Solid State Energy Materials and University Research Professor at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo Canada. She is cross appointed to the departments of Chemistry, Physics and Electrical Engineering. She is a member of the Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. She is known for her work on energy storage materials with topics that span Li-S and Li-O2 batteries; Li-ion, Na-ion, Mg-ion and Zn-ion batteries, solid-state electrolytes, and the role that nanotechnology plays in energy materials science.  Her work has earned her place on the Web of Science’s 2014, 2016 and 2017 Highly Cited Researcher Lists, and numerous professional honours and awards. Dr Nazar is a Member of the Editorial Board of several scientific journals, including Energy & Environmental Science, Angewandte Chemie, ACS Central Science, and serves on several international scientific boards and committees.

Professor John Irvine is Professor of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews, is a visiting professor at Queens University, Belfast; 1000 Talents Professor at Fujian Institute for Research in the Structure of Matter and is European Councillor for the International Society of Solid State Ionics. In 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2008 he received the Royal Society of Chemistry Materials Chemistry Award and the Sustainable Energy Award in 2015 and European Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Forum Schönbein Gold Medal, in 2016. He has over 450 publications in refereed journals including Nature and Nature Materials. He has developed new concepts in fuel cells such as the Hybrid Direct Carbon Fuel Cell, has a leading role in the field of developing redox stable, coking tolerant oxide electrodes for SOFCs and discovered the first significant interstitial oxide ion conductor.

Professor Jennifer Rupp is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Prior she is a non‐tenure track assistant professor at ETH Zurich Switzerland where she was holding two prestigious externally funded career grants, namely an ERC Starting Grant (SNSF) and Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) professorship from 2012 on. Rupp team`s current research interests are on solid state material design and tuning of structure-property relations for novel energy and information devices and operation schemes. This ranges from alternative energy storage via batteries or catalytic convertor systems processing by smart material design solar light and CO₂ to renewable synthetic fuels, or novel types of neuromorphic memories and computing logic entities for data storage and transfer beyond transistors. Here, her team goes the whole way from material design, novel processing techniques to make ceramics, cermets or glassy-‐type ceramic structures up to device prototypes, their operation and characteristics. 

She has published more than 80 papers, holds 4 patents, and enjoys to be active discussing material tech trends on the theme of energy with the public, economists and policy makers being a frequent speaker and member of the World Economic Forum (2015 - 2017). 

Rupp and team received several honours and awards such as the "2017 Electrochemistry Award by BASF and Volkswagen" for their battery research, keynote lecture at Nature Energy conference 2016, "Top 40 international scientist under the age of 40" by World Economic Forum 2015, Spark Award for the most innovative and economically important invention of the year 2014 at ETH Zurich, Gordon Research lecture 2014, the Kepler award “new materials in energy technology” by the European Academy of Science 2012 or Young Scientist Award by the Solid State Ionic Society. 

Anton Van der Ven is Professor of Materials at the University of California Santa Barbara. His research seeks to unravel the links between the electronic structure of solids and their macroscopic properties using first-principles statistical mechanics. He studies a wide variety of materials classes for electrochemical energy storage and high temperature aerospace applications. He has spent almost two decades investigating the unique electronic, thermodynamic and kinetic properties of transition metal oxides and sulfides used as electrodes in Li-ion batteries. His group develops statistical mechanics methods and accompanying software tools to predict the properties of complex crystals from first principles. Van der Ven studied metallurgy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and obtained a PhD in Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Aron Walsh is Professor of Materials Design at Imperial College London. He was awarded his PhD in chemistry from Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), completed a postdoctoral position at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (USA), and held a Marie Curie fellowship at University College London. He began his independent research career at the University of Bath and held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in the Department of Chemistry. His research combines technique development and applications at the interface between solid-state chemistry and physics.

Andy Cooper is a Nottingham graduate (1991), also obtaining his PhD there in 1994. After his PhD, he held a 1851 Fellowship and a Royal Society NATO Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, and then a Ramsay Memorial Research Fellowship at the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis in Cambridge. In 1999, he was appointed as a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in Liverpool.  He is the founding Director of the Centre for Materials Discovery, established in 2007, and was Head of Chemistry and then the first Head of the School of Physical Sciences in the period 2007-2012. He led the UK RPIF bid to establish the Materials Innovation Factory and is its first Academic Director. He is also the Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Functional Materials Design. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2015.

Andy’s research interests are polymeric materials, porous materials, supramolecular chemistry, and materials for energy production and storage. He also has a strong technical interest in high-throughput materials discovery methods. He has been awarded the Macro Group Young Researchers Award (2002), the RSC Award in Environmentally Friendly Polymers (2005), the McBain Medal (2007), the Corday-Morgan Prize (2009), the Macro Group Award (2010), a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, and the Tilden Prize (2014). In 2011, he was named in a Thomson Reuters list as one of the Top 100 materials scientists of the last decade, one of eight UK scientists so listed.

Professor Dame Julia Higgins DBE FRS FREng is Professor of Polymer Science in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology at Imperial College and a former Vice President and Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society. 

She was the first Chair of the Steering Committee of the Athena project, a UK wide government funded activity to improve recruitment, retention and advancement of women in academic posts in Science Technology and Medicine. From 2008 to 2012 she chaired the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (ACME) and was Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council from 2003 to 2007. In 1999, Dame Julia was elected as Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She was President of the Institution of Chemical Engineers in 2002-03, and President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from 2003–04. 

Dame Julia is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, and Royal Society of Chemistry. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of Somerville College, Oxford. She was awarded a CBE in 1996 before being named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2001 Queen's Birthday Honours list. She holds honorary degrees from a number of Universities in the UK as well as from Melbourne University in Australia. She is also a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States. In 2010, the UKRC announced Dame Julia Higgins as one of six Women of Outstanding Achievement in Science, Engineering and Technology.

Dame Julia currently Chair’s the Royal Society Diversity Programme Steering Group, is a member of the Royal Society Equality and Diversity Advisory Network (EDAN), and is also Vice-Chair of the Royal Society Vision for science and mathematics education 5-19 project committee.

Professor Hywel Thomas is Pro Vice-Chancellor, Research, Innovation and Engagement at Cardiff University. In this role he is responsible for the University’s research activities, the innovation agenda, including commercialisation and the broader economic impact of the University.

Professor Thomas is also a Professor of Civil Engineering, Director of the Geoenvironmental Research Centre (GRC) and a UNESCO Professor in the Development of a Sustainable Geoenvironment.

His research interests cover a wide range of geoenvironmental issues, from coupled Multiphysics/geochemistry flow problems in soils and rocks, through to sustainability issues in general. Current interests include the geoenergy field, with major projects on ground source heat, underground coal gasification, exploitation of unconventional gas and carbon sequestration in coal seams.

Professor Thomas is closely involved in a number of Royal Society initiatives. He chaired the recent Royal Society work on "Options for producing low carbon Hydrogen at Scale". He currently chairs the joint Royal Society/Royal Academy of Engineering study of research into Shale Gas exploitation. He also recently joined the Minister's CCUS Council.