Susan Robertson

CFO and Chair of the EDI Working Group

The Faraday Institution

Prior to joining the Faraday Institution, Susan was Chief Financial Officer of Velocys, the AIM-listed renewable fuels company, a position she held for 10 years through the company’s transformational years from early stage start-up to the point of having a commercial plant in operation. Prior to that, she was at the BOC Group (now Linde Group) where she held various senior-level financial management and business development positions in the UK and in Japan. Susan helped to set up and then, from 2003 to 2006, served as Vice President and CFO of Japan Air Gases (JAG), a joint venture between The BOC Group and Air Liquide.

Susan has an honours degree in economics from the University of Cambridge and is a chartered accountant (FCA) having originally trained with Arthur Andersen in London.

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Neil Cadman

SOLBAT Project Manager

University of Oxford

Neil is Project Manager for the SOLBAT Solid State Battery project, led by Oxford University and including academic collaborators from the Universities of Liverpool, Warwick and Sheffield and University College London.

Neil joined Oxford after a career in industry, working with several multinational companies and as a consultant delivering workshops across the world in Africa, Asia and Northern Europe.

Neil holds an honours degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Birmingham and is a chartered Management Accountant

Dr Jacqueline Edge

Multi-scale Modelling research fellow

Imperial College London

Jacqueline grew up in South Africa and completed first a B.Sc. in Zoology and then a B.Sc. in Computer Science, both at the University of Cape Town. This led to a career as an internet developer and, after moving to London, developing banking intranet tools. Since banking is not known for its social welfare activities, she decided to go back to study clean energy at UCL, starting with an M.Sc. in Nanotechnology and finally a Ph.D. in Hydrogen Storage. She ran the Energy Storage Research Network in the Energy Futures Lab at Imperial College London for four years, facilitating research collaborations in the growing area of energy storage. She is now a Faraday Institution Project Leader in the Mechanical Engineering Dept. of the College, managing a large research consortium on multi-scale modelling of Li-ion batteries and leading the sustainability modelling work.

Dr Jennifer Hartley

ReLiB Research Fellow

University of Leicester

Dr Jennifer Hartley is a Faraday Institution Research Fellow at the University of Leicester working on the ReLiB project, developing methods to recycle and regenerate lithium-ion battery materials. She was previously a postdoc at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany, Designed redox properties of strategically important metals through ionometallurgy with Prof Gero Frisch. She obtained her PhD in 2014, with the topic “Ionometallurgy: The processing of metals using ionic liquids” at the University of Leicester, working for Prof Andrew Abbott.

Dr Alex Kersting

Degradation Project Programme Manager

University of Cambridge

Dr Alex Kersting is the Faraday Institution’s Degradation Project Programme Manager. In 2012 she attained her PhD with Dr Paul Anderson from the University of Birmingham working on hydrogen storage materials.

Prior to joining the Degradation project she worked at the Royal Society for Chemistry for nine years supporting professional chemists to gain statutory qualifications.

Dr Melanie Loveridge

SafeBatt Co-investigator

WMG, University of Warwick

Dr Melanie Loveridge is an Associate Professor of Electrochemical Materials at WMG. With over 12 years of experience within Li-ion battery research, she has spent equal amounts of time in academic research and as a characterisation specialist for a spin-out company from Imperial College. Her research areas focus on materials discovery and characterisation techniques, but also understanding mechanisms of degradation and battery forensics. Dr Loveridge is a lead inventor on several world patent families around electrode materials, compositions and structures, with > 30 publications in Q1 journals. Since returning to academia, she has won > £ 3 M in research grants from EPSRC calls, Energy Superstore Early Career Research award, The Faraday Institution and H2020’s Graphene Flagship. She sits on many advisory panels and committees for academia and industry and regularly engages with many outreach activities, including the British Science Festival, Radio 4’s Today Program and Costing the Earth, with several media articles published, e.g. The Telegraph. From 2020 Dr Loveridge has been an associate editor for Frontiers in Chemical Engineering and the Special Topics section in MDPI Coatings.

Professor James Marco

Nextrode Co-investigator

WMG, University of Warwick

James Marco is a Chartered Engineer and Professor with nearly 25 years’ experience leading collaborative research across industry and academia on battery systems engineering, modelling, characterisation and control. James is Head of the Energy Directorate at WMG and leads the Battery Systems Research Group. His broad research interests are focussed on the challenge of scaling-up individual battery cells to complete energy storage systems, including the use of novel sensing methods, data-driven and experimental techniques to enhance battery safety, extend battery life and optimise performance. James is Co-Investigator on the Multi-scale Modelling, Nextrode and SafeBatt projects.

Dr Ashok S. Menon

FutureCat Research Fellow

WMG, University of Warwick

Dr Ashok S. Menon is an Assistant Professor (Research-focused) at WMG, University of Warwick, and a joint FutureCat-WMG research fellow. He obtained his PhD in materials chemistry from Uppsala University, Sweden in 2021. Soon after, he joined Prof. Louis Piper’s group at WMG, where he studies the high-voltage electronic and crystallographic transitions in Ni-rich layered Li-ion battery cathodes using X-ray characterisation techniques.

Dr Jiyu Tian

NEXGENNA Post Doctoral Research Fellow

University of St Andrews

Jiyu Tian is a postdoctoral researcher who joined the University of St Andrews in May 2023, working on the NEXGENNA project. He researches material scale-up and pouch cell manufacturing, focusing on the thermal and failure analysis of pouch cells and systematic solutions for better cell performance.

Previously, Jiyu worked as a senior engineer at Huawei Tech Co. Ltd., Shenzhen for 1 year and a half. He specialised in advancing the development of high-energy silicon anode technology for lithium-ion batteries.

Jiyu holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews. During his doctoral studies his research primarily revolved around organic-inorganic hybrid halide perovskite materials.

Dr Darren Walsh

LiSTAR Co-Investigator

University of Nottingham

Dr Darren Walsh is Associate Professor of Physical Chemistry in the University of Nottingham School of Chemistry. The group he leads works on a range of electrochemical topics, many of which are related to electrochemical energy storage and conversion. He is the author of over 50 original research articles and invited book chapters in the areas of physical and analytical electrochemistry. He also enjoys bringing his science to the public. He performs chemistry demonstration lectures for general audiences and is a presenter on the Periodic Table of Videos, an award-winning chemistry channel on YouTube. He gained his PhD from Dublin City University and has held a a research position at the University of Texas in Austin.