Jerry Barker

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Jerry Barker received his PhD in solid state electrochemistry from the University of Exeter. In his early career Jerry worked at BP and also spent time at UCSB where he collaborated and published with the Nobel prize winners Alan Heeger and Hideki Shirakawa on alkali metal doped polyacetylene. He is currently co-founder and CTO of Faradion Limited, a UK-based start-up company specializing in next generation Na-ion battery technology. Previously Jerry was Chief Scientist and Research Director at Valence Technology Inc. In May 2019, Jerry was appointed Honorary Professor within the School of Chemistry at the University of St. Andrews.

Jerry has published extensively in the energy storage area (h-index = 56, total number of citations >10,000) and is a named inventor on more than 120 issued US patents. Jerry is the inventor of a number of Na-ion and Li-ion active materials, including surface-stabilized LiMn2O4, Tavorite structured active materials, Na3V2(PO4)2F3, NaVPO4F, LiVPO4F, Li3V2(PO4)3, LiFe(Mg)PO4, as well as the Carbothermal Reduction (CTR) manufacturing method. To date, these inventions have culminated in 4 commercially successful battery enterprises and CTR is widely regarded as the benchmark, industry-standard method for the large-scale manufacture of LiFePO4.

In 2012, Jerry was awarded the IBA Technology Award for his contributions to Li-ion battery materials. He has appeared as a patent litigation expert witness in Europe and in North America. He has also acted as the due diligence technical expert for a number of VC-backed start-up companies. Jerry currently acts as an Expert Panel member for the UK’s Faraday Institution, as a Board Member of the UK Li-BATT consortium and serves on the advisory board for Australia’s storEnergy initiative.

Nigel Brandon

Imperial College London

Professor Nigel Brandon OBE is Dean of Engineering at Imperial College London, Director of the UK Hydrogen and Fuel Cell SUPERGEN Hub, Co-Director of the UK SUPERGEN energy storage Hub, and Chair of Imperials’ Sustainable Gas Institute. His research is focused on electrochemical devices for energy applications, with a particular focus on fuel cells, flow cells, electrolysers, and batteries. He was the founding Director of the Energy Futures Lab at Imperial College, a founder of Ceres Power, an AIM listed fuel cell company spun out from Imperial College in 2000, and a founder of RFC Power, a flow battery company spun out from Imperial College in 2018. He was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal in 2007, the Inst. Civil Engineers Baker Medal in 2011, and the ASME Francis Bacon Medal in 2014. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, and the Energy Institute.

Dan Brett

University College London

Dan received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Imperial College London in 2000. He is Professor of Electrochemical Engineering at UCL, where he is a director of the Electrochemical Innovation Lab (EIL) and Advanced Propulsion Lab (APL). He is an academic founder of the Faraday Institution and member of the Expert Panel.

Dan’s research encompasses a broad range of electrochemical technology, with a particular focus on fuel cells, batteries, supercapacitors, electrolysers, and redox flow batteries. His research has been recognised through the 2009 De Nora Prize for Applied Electrochemistry (International Society of Electrochemistry), the Baker Medal in 2011 (Inst. Civil Engineers), and The Engineer Collaborate to Innovate Award for lithium-ion battery safety research in 2017.

His research has been commercialised through the spin-out companies Amalyst (advanced electrochemical materials) and Bramble Energy (fuel cell stacks and systems), where he is the Director of Innovation.

Anthony Burrell

NREL

Anthony K. Burrell is chief technologist for energy storage at the US Department of Energy’s National Renewal Energy Laboratory (NREL). He has been working in the areas of energy science and technology since the early 1990s with a specific focus on energy storage. Recently, he was the department head for electrochemical energy storage at Argonne National Laboratory.

He holds a PhD in chemistry from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

David Greenwood

WMG

David Greenwood is the CEO of the WMG centre High Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult at the University of Warwick, where he is also Professor of Advanced Propulsion Systems. His research spans batteries, electric motors, power electronics, and the integration and control of these for propulsion and energy applications. He joined WMG in 2014 from engineering consultancy Ricardo UK Ltd where he was Head of Hybrid and Electric Systems leading advanced technology projects for OEM and Tier 1 customers in passenger cars, defence, motorsport and the clean energy markets. Professor Greenwood holds advisory and board positions for the Advanced Propulsion Centre, and Innovate UK (Faraday Challenge and IDP), EPSRC (Energy). He is head of the Advanced Propulsion Centre’s Electrical Energy Storage Spoke

Valentina Gentili

Jaguar Land Rover

Dr Valentina Gentili is Senior Manager for Cell Technology at Jaguar Land Rover.

Having over 15 years of experience across a wide range of disciplines within the lithium-ion advanced materials and automotive battery research and development field, Valentina leads the delivery of electrified vehicle battery cell technology in support of the product cycle plan, as well as formulating and delivering next generation cell technology strategies at JLR.

Valentina obtained her PhD in Chemistry from the University of St Andrews; with a thesis on “Nano-materials for use as anodes in lithium-ion batteries” under the supervision of Prof. Peter G. Bruce.

A Robert Hillman

University of Leicester

Robert Hillman was educated at Imperial College London (BSc, 1976) and Oxford University (DPhil, 1979). After postdoctoral research at Imperial College, he was appointed to a Lectureship at the University of Bristol (1983), to the Chair of Physical Chemistry at the University of Leicester (1992), and as Dean of the Faculty of Science (2003-2009). He was Scientific Editor of Faraday Transactions and Faraday Discussions (1994-1997) and has been Editor in Chief of Electrochimica Acta since 2014. Robert has served the International Society of Electrochemistry as UK National Secretary (1994-1998), Secretary General (1999-2005), Chair of the Scientific Meetings Committee (2006-07) and President (2009-2010), and the Electrochemical Society through its Sensor Division and Education Committees. He is an elected Fellow of the International Society of Electrochemistry and of the Electrochemical Society.

His research interests in electrochemistry have involved surface modification, electrodeposition, interfacial characterization, materials science and interfacial analysis and imaging. He has pioneered the development of a number of acoustic wave, optical, spectroscopic, neutron reflectivity and surface analytical techniques for in situ interfacial characterization. These works are represented in over 230 publications. Present research focuses on electrodeposition / dissolution of metals, polymers and composites, particularly using combined optical/acoustic methods and neutron reflectivity. Fundamental studies are complemented by application of electrochemical deposition processes for the visualization of latent fingermarks on metal, paper and polymer surfaces associated with investigation of a range of violent and acquisitive crimes.

Robert Millar

Williams Advanced Engineering

Rob Millar is the Head of Electrical for Williams Advanced Engineering, the technology and engineering services business of the Williams Group.

He has been involved with vehicle electrification since 2004 when he founded his own company developing electronic systems for Modec, Tata, JLR and Daimler vehicles amongst others. Having first worked with Williams in 2010, when he was part of the team who delivered the Jaguar C-X75 programme. Rob joined the company as a full-time employee in 2016 to head up the company’s battery and electronics programmes.

John Owen

University of Southampton

John Owen is an Emeritus Professor in the Southampton Electrochemistry Group. After his early studies on lithium anodes, polymer electrolytes and composite electrodes at Imperial College, London in 1979 he began an academic career at Salford in 1984 then Southampton since 1991, training students and postdoctoral researchers in batteries, supercapacitors and simple models of their energy and power limitations. His research has mainly comprised the characterisation of electrochemical materials, e.g. ceramic, glass, polymer, gel and liquid nonaqueous electrolytes, electron conducting polymers, nanocomposites, redox mediators and their applications in batteries, particularly lithium ion, lithium-air and lithium sulfur.

Julia Rowe

Johnson Matthey

Julia Rowe is Sustainability Manager for Johnson Matthey (JM), a position she has he held for over a decade. In this role, she ensures the corporate sustainability strategy is incorporated into all aspects of its business, from the way decisions are made on R&D projects & capital investments to the way manufacturing plants are run globally. Her current focus is developing JM’s corporate Net Zero strategy, enhancing its global responsible sourcing strategy and building up its product life cycle assessment capability. Over the last few years, she has been working with JM’s Battery Materials business to ensure sustainability is integral to the design of its first cathode manufacturing plant, currently under construction in Poland, and all its supply chains. In prior positions over her 25-year career at JM, she has managed technical projects in the area of hydrogen generation and hydrogen PEM fuel cell technology and as served as Technology Commercialisation Manager for JM’s first membrane electrode assembly plant. Julia has an MA (Oxon) in chemistry and a PhD in catalysis with surface science.

Peter G Bruce

University of Oxford (chair)

Peter is a founder and Chief Scientist of the Faraday Institution, the UK centre for research on electrochemical energy storage. He is Wolfson Professor of Materials at the University of Oxford. Peter took up the position of Physical Secretary and Vice President of the Royal in November 2018.

His research interests embrace materials chemistry and electrochemistry, with a particular emphasis on energy storage, especially lithium and sodium batteries. Recent efforts have focused on the synthesis and understanding of new materials for lithium and sodium-ion batteries, on understanding anomalous oxygen redox processes in transition metal oxides used as high capacity Li-ion cathodes, the challenges of the lithium-air battery and the influence of order on the ionic conductivity of polymer electrolytes.

Peter received the Tilden Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2008, the Carl Wagner Award of the Electrochemical Society in 2011, the Liversidge Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2016 and the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society in 2017. He has also been selected as Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics since 2015.

Paul Anderson

University of Birmingham

Professor Paul Anderson is the Principal Investigator for the Faraday ReLiB project. At the University of Birmingham he is Professor of Strategic Elements and Materials Sustainability and Co-Director of the Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials

The synthesis and development of improved materials for energy applications has been a major theme of his research for over two decades, with particular interests in ion mobility in hydrogen storage materials and related Li+and H+electrolyte systems, and the efficient husbandry of the earth’s elemental resources.

Serena Cussen

University of Sheffield

Prof Serena Cussen is Chair of Functional Nanomaterials and Director of Research at the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering at the University of Sheffield and leads the Energy Storage Research Centre. She obtained her BA (2002) and PhD (2007) in Chemistry from Trinity College Dublin. She completed her PhD work on New Magnetic Nanostructured Materials with Professor Yurii Gun’ko, where she developed new magnetic materials for biomedical applications. After a lectureship at the University of Kent, Serena joined the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow as a lecturer in Physical Chemistry in 2013, was promoted to Reader in 2016 and made Professor and Chair of Energy Materials in 2018.

Her research addresses the rational design and morphology control of energy storage materials, particularly their structure-performance interplay (including high Ni-content cathodes and high capacity electrodes). She is an international leader in the battery community, directing several multi-institutional research programmes, serving on international advisory boards, publishing in high-impact journals and proactively engaging public interest in next-generation batteries.

Patrick Grant

University of Oxford

Patrick Grant FREng is the Vesuvius Professor of Materials and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Oxford. His research takes place at the interface between advanced materials and manufacturing. Particular applications include electrodes for energy storage and advanced metallics for power generation. Many of his research projects are concerned with solidification behaviour in complex alloys, and/or the use of liquid metal, ceramic or polymer droplet and powder sprays to create unusual materials. All the research work involves close collaboration with industry.

Clare Grey DBE

University of Cambridge

Clare P. Grey, FRS is a Royal Society Research Professor, 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 of the Northeastern Chemical Energy Storage Centre, a US Department of Energy, Energy Frontier Research Centre, (2009-2010) and Associate director (2011-2014). She is currently Director of the EPSRC Centre for Advanced Materials for Integrated Energy Systems (CAM-IES) and a member of the Expert Panel of the Faraday Institution.

Recent honours and awards include Honorary PhD Degrees from the Universities of Orleans (2012) and Lancaster (2013), 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), the Solid State Ionics Galvani-Nernst-Wagner Mid-Career Award (2017), the Eastern Analytical Symposium Award for Outstanding Achievements in Magnetic Resonance (2018), the Sacconi Medal from the Italian Chemical Society (2018), the Charles Hatchett Award, Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (2019), and the RSC John Goodenough Award (2019).

She is a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society and the International Society of Magnetic Resonance. 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.

John Irvine

University of St Andrews

John Irvine FRSE, FRSC is Professor in the School of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews. He has made a unique and world-leading contribution to the science of energy materials, especially fuel cell and energy conversion technologies. This research has ranged from detailed fundamental to strategic and applied science and has had major impact across academia, industry and government. Prof Irvine’s science is highly interdisciplinary extending from chemistry and materials through physics, bioenergy, geoscience, engineering, economics and policy.

The quality and impact of Prof Irvine’s research has been recognised by a number of national and international awards, including the Lord Kelvin Medal from the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2018, the Schönbeim gold medal from the European Fuel Cell Forum in 2016, the RSC Sustainable Energy Award in 2015, with earlier RSC recognition via Materials Chemistry, Bacon and Beilby awards/medals. Irvine has almost 500 publications and has an WoS h-index of 64. He has strong international standing having held senior visiting appointments in the US, Australia and China and has strong links with a number of leading laboratories across the Chinese Academy of Science including being Thousand Talents professor at Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter.

Saiful Islam

University of Oxford

Saiful Islam is Statutory Chair in Materials Modelling in the Department of Materials, University of Oxford. He grew up in London and obtained his Chemistry degree and PhD from University College London (with Richard Catlow FRS), followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Eastman Kodak Labs in New York. He returned to the UK to the University of Surrey before joining the University of Bath in 2006.

His research interests include structural, transport and computational studies of new materials for lithium-ion batteries and perovskite solar cells. He has presented more than 80 invited conference talks and has over 215 publications. He is the recipient of several awards including the 2020 ACS Award in Energy Chemistry, 2017 RSC Peter Day Award for Materials Chemistry and 2013 Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit award.

Saiful presented the 2016 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for BBC TV, entitled ‘Supercharged: Fuelling the Future.’ He is a Patron of Humanists UK and sits on the Public Engagement Committee of the Royal Society. When not exploring new materials, he enjoys family breaks (as a dad of two), football, indie music and The Guardian over a coffee.

Gregory Offer

Imperial College London

Professor Gregory Offer is a Reader (Associate Professor) at Imperial College London and leads the Electrochemical Science & Engineering Group in Mechanical Engineering. Greg was a founder of the Faraday Institution in the UK and runs the Multi-Scale Modelling project involving 23 academics across 9 institutions. The group works with multiple industry partners on projects worth over £32.5M since starting his group in 2010. Greg has also worked as a management consultant and a government advisor. Greg’s research is at the interface between the science and engineering of electrochemical devices. Having trained as an electrochemist before moving to engineering, his research portfolio focuses on understanding the limits of operation, degradation mechanisms and failure modes of batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells in real world applications, and the impacts and consequences on system design, integration and control. Greg has published multiple peer reviewed journal papers, patents, technical reports and books. Greg is also a co-founder of two battery related start-ups, Cognition Energy Ltd and Breathe Battery Technologies Ltd.

Mauro Pasta

University of Oxford

Mauro Pasta, SOLBAT Project

Prof. Mauro Pasta FRSC is Professor of Applied Electrochemistry in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford. He has been leading the SOLBAT project at the Faraday Institution since its inception, initially as Project Leader and from 2023 as Principal Investigator. He has co-founded three battery startup companies: Natron Energy, Cuberg, and Project K. Professor Pasta earned his BSc, MSc, and PhD in Industrial Chemistry from the University of Milan, in his native Italy. Prior to joining the University of Oxford’s faculty, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Material Science & Engineering department at Stanford University. Professor Pasta’s research interests lie at the intersection between electrochemistry and materials chemistry to develop novel materials, devices and systems for energy conversion and storage, with expertise in battery chemistries beyond Li-ion.

Louis Piper

University of Warwick

Louis Piper is the Professor of Battery Innovation and heads the Electrochemical Materials group in the Energy Directorate at WMG, the University of Warwick.  He co-leads the Faraday Institution Degradation Phase II project focusing on understanding how to improve capacity retention in state-of-art Ni-rich and phosphate chemistries.  His current research focus is on employing novel methods for studying real-format batteries in operating conditions to better understand how to improve performance.

Louis completed his PhD in Physics at Warwick University in 2006 and spent 4 years at the National Synchrotron Light Source (Upton, NY) before joining the faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York (SUNY). At Binghamton he was Professor of Physics, Applied Physics and Astronomy and Director of the Materials Science & Engineering Program (2017 – 2020) and won the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Creative Activities (2018). His research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy and US Air Force Office for Scientific Research and employed a range of synchrotron-based spectroscopy techniques to explain optical, electronic and electrochemical phenomena of functional metal oxides, for applications as smart displays; memristors; photocatalysts and Li-ion battery cathodes. Prior joining WMG, he worked alongside M Stanley Whittingham co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery and 2019 Nobel Laureate of Chemistry as part of the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES). As part of these activities, he has pioneered several advanced spectroscopic tools for cathode battery studies i.e., hard X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (HAXPES) and resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) and made several critical contributions to the understanding of cathode-electrolyte interfaces, oxygen redox and the realisation of multi-electrodes for increased capacity.

Paul Shearing

University College London

Paul Shearing is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at UCL, where he holds the RAEng Chair in Emerging Battery Technologies, which recognises ‘global research visionaries’. He is co-director (alongside Dan Brett) of the Electrochemical Innovation Lab (EIL), the UK’s largest electrochemical engineering laboratory. He was 2014 Young Chemical Engineer of the Year and the 2016 RAEng Young Engineer of the Year. His work focuses on the development of next generation battery materials (the subject of his RAEng Chair) with work on Li-S batteries including the first application of 4D-imaging tools and the first use of image-based modelling to describe electrode behaviour. He has worked extensively with industry to translate this understanding of Li-S electrodes to commercial environments. He is a Fellow of the IChemE, leads the UK’s STFC Batteries Network, and chairs the Faraday Institution’s Training & Diversity Panel.