Powering Britain's
Battery Revolution
Powering Britain's
Battery Revolution
We’re delighted to announce the winners of this year’s Faraday Institution Community Awards. Join us in celebrating members of the community who demonstrate excellence and behaviours in line with our mission and values – and who go above and beyond.
Photo: Awards ceremony at Faraday Institution Conference 2024. From left to right: Saiful Islam (University of Oxford), Virginia Echavarri-Bravo and Louise Horsfall (University of Edinburgh), Martin Freer (CEO of the Faraday Institution), James Robinson (UCL), Fiona Coomer (Echion Technologies), Peter Slater (University of Birmingham) and Sam Cooper (Co-founder of Polaron).
Congratulations to our winners
The Innovation Award recognises an individual or team that have made a significant contribution via the development of an outstanding innovation. Nominations were invited to highlight excellent examples of innovations across a range of spheres: novel experiments, techniques, products, technology, approaches, processes, as well as inclusivity or training initiatives.
The winner of the Innovation Award 2024 goes to Dr Steve Kench, co-founder and CTO of Polaron
Dr Steve Kench
This is a truly inspiring success story. The nomination highlights exceptional achievements, from impactful research outputs, to the generation of IP, and the creation of a spin-out company that is already demonstrating its considerable potential.
As a Faraday Institution PhD Researcher at Imperial College London working on the Multi-scale Modelling project, Steve developed a material design tool that takes microstructural image data and trains bespoke AI models that help inform the design of future batteries. IP developed during his PhD was the foundation of the spin-out company, Polaron, set up to commercialise the technology. The start-up has signed contracts with a number of UK companies that are beginning to deploy generative AI into their design workflow. The approach shows huge potential impact in the battery industry and beyond. Steve’s success to date highlights how research carried out even at an early career stage could have a lasting effect on the wider community. It should serve as inspiration for anyone hoping to take their research on a similar path.
Many congratulations to Steve for his achievements! We are excited to see the future impact Polaron will make.
Read more about Polaron’s success to date.
The Innovation Award was kindly sponsored by Withers and Rogers.
The Collaboration Award recognises outstanding examples of research progress through multi-university, multi-disciplinary and/or academic-industry collaboration.
The winner of this award is the collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Echion Technologies, led by Professor Peter Slater.
Some of the researchers involved with the Echion Technologies / University of Birmingham collaboration.
This is a strong example of an impactful, long-standing academic-industry collaboration that has brought together university researchers at many different career stages with industry staff from Echion. It has led to the identification of new niobium oxide-based anode materials, yielding two patents and several publications. The new XNO® phases are being assessed for commercial viability and manufacturability. The partnership has provided training and development for researchers from both organisations as well as opportunities for further collaborations with other Faraday Institution projects. Most recently, an Industry Sprint has begun with ReLiB researchers to develop recycling methodologies for the innovative high power anode. This relationship showcases the wide-reaching impact that collaborations can have on academia output, the commercialisation of products by industry organisations, and the development of researchers involved.
Please join us in congratulating the whole team, from the University of Birmingham (Peter Slater, Emma Kendrick, Paul Anderson, Gary Leeke, Elizabeth Driscoll, Yazid Lakhdar, Dominika Gastol, Alex Green, Yongxiu Chen, and Aron Spiller) FUSE Interns (Gagandeep Nandera and Lauren-Marie Lawrence) and Echion Technologies (Alexander Groombridge, Wanwei Zhang, Jason Wu, Harry Geary, Maurits Houck, Daniel Martin, Fiona Coomer, Joshua Lewis, Andrew Pauza and Ramon Cabiscol), on their achievements!
Read more about the success of the collaboration.
The Collaboration Award was kindly sponsored by The Henry Royce Institute.
This award is given in recognition of an individual’s or team’s outstanding contribution to the local or national community in relation to science communication or the promotion of STEM careers.
The winner of the 2024 Public Engagement / STEM Outreach Award is Professor Saiful Islam, University of Oxford.
Professor Saiful Islam
Professor Saiful Islam continues to make outstanding and impactful contributions to science communication, outreach activities and the promotion of STEM to large numbers of school students and the general public at a local, national and international level. His long-standing commitment fully aligns with the Faraday Institution objectives of public engagement and dissemination of its battery research activities.
From setting world records with the largest lemon batteries to highlighting the outcomes of the CATMAT project via social media, Saiful has shown on numerous occasions how impactful initiatives can be for inspiring the next generation of scientists and to engage the public with research into energy storage. Recent contributions include presenting the keynote lecture at the March 2024 Royal Society Student Conference, and, in October 2023, appearing in the podcast “They’ve made us” to discuss two people that inspired his career (including Michael Faraday).
Congratulations Saiful!
Read more about Saiful’s ongoing outreach and engagement activities.
The Public Engagement/STEM Outreach Award was kindly sponsored by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
This award is in recognition of an individual that goes above and beyond in the role of aiding and developing early career researchers in their research and career paths.
The 2024 Researcher Development Champion is Dr James Robinson from UCL.
James Robinson at the ECR Conference & Training Event
James has been instrumental in the development of early career researchers throughout the Faraday Institution community in his role as chair of the Early Career Researcher (ECR) Committee. Under his expert leadership, the committee planned and delivered the 2024 ECR Conference and Training Event, providing training, insight, networking and opportunities to present for 210 ECRs. James also spearheaded the creation of the ECR Collaboration Award, an initiative that has allowed researchers to get experience in both applying for and leading their own project. He was nominated for the award independently by two different groups of ECRs, and his nominations were supported by a wealth of evidence and first-hand accounts from 24 researchers from 11 universities across eight Faraday Institution projects, demonstrating the reach of his influence. James proactively mentors and champions ECRs and creates a positive and supportive research network. He frequently and selflessly goes above and beyond what would be expected of any researcher and exemplifies the difference one individual can make on the success and career aspirations of large numbers of ECRs, the impact of which will be seen for years to come.
Please reach out to James to congratulate him and let him know the difference he has made to you personally!
The Researcher Development Champion Award was kindly sponsored by Prosemino.
The Innovation category received a number of very strong nominations this year. As such we recognise the achievements of a second group for their achievements in this category.
Louise and Virginia winning the Global Trends Grand Prix at 2050NOW La Maison 2024
The Horsfall Group is recognised for their research on engineering bacteria to recover valuable metals from lithium-ion batteries at end-of-life. In a highly innovative technique, the team is harnessing the ability of microbes and examining the processes potential for biomanufacturing metal nanoparticles from battery leachates. This innovative and sustainable methodology is showing promise at lab scale, with scale-up work continuing. The team were recently recognised by winning the grand prize at the 2050NOW La Maison’s global trends forum in Paris.
We look forward to hearing more about the future development and scale up of this technique.
Read more about the group’s innovative technique.
Congratulations to the Horsfall Group!
Summary
Please join us in extending congratulations to all the individuals and teams that we have recognised with these awards. Thank you to all those that nominated these groups and individuals.
Our thanks to chair of the panel David Howey (University of Oxford) and panel members Thomas Bartlett (Innovate UK), Ivana Hasa (WMG, University of Warwick), Sean Scott (Leicester University), Lizzy Olisa (Imperial College London) and Alison Cavey (Orion Innovations), as well as Francesca Long (formerly of FIHQ) for their service in selecting winners.
Thanks also to the representatives of the awards sponsors who reviewed nominations in their categories: Joanna Thurston of Withers and Rogers, Rob Weatherup representing the Henry Royce Institute, Chris Howard of Prosemino, and Rory McNulty representing Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
Who do you value in our community? Whose contribution should be recognised? Which other successes should we celebrate?
Look out for details for nominations for next year’s awards.
Posted on September 11, 2024