5th International solar fuels conference

Kara Bren is the Richard S. Eisenberg Professor in Chemistry and Chemistry Department Chair at the University of Rochester, NY, USA. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Kavli Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She earned her B.A. in Chemistry at Carleton College in Minnesota, and her Ph.D. at Caltech working with Harry Gray and as a Visiting Student in the lab of Ivano Bertini in Florence, Italy. After an NIH Postdoc with Gerd LaMar at the University of California Davis, she started her independent academic career at the University of Rochester. Her research has included investigations of metalloprotein dynamics and electronic structure. Currently, her group is focused on developing bioinorganic systems for energy conversion and storage.

Sophia Haussener is an Associate Professor heading the Laboratory of Renewable Energy Science and Engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). She received her MSc (2007) and PhD (2010) in Mechanical Engineering from ETH Zurich. Between 2011 and 2012, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Joint Center of Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) and the Energy Environmental Technology Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). She is a member of EPFL’s research award commission and of EPFL’s Academic Strategic Committee. She has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and 2 books. She has been awarded the ETH medal (2011), the Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation award (2011), the ABB Forschungspreis (2012), a Starting Grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation (2014), the Prix Zonta (2015), the Global Change Award (2017), the Raymond Viskanta Award on Radiative Transfer (2019), and the Yellott award (2024). She is a co-founder of the startup SoHHytec aiming at commercializing photoelectrochemical hydrogen production. She is the former chair of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ (ASME) Solar Energy Division (2018), a former member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Helmholtz Zentrum (2016-2022), a member of the scientific board of the Liquid Sunlight Alliance, and a member of the Ethics Board of Arete Ethik Invest.

Her current research is focused on providing design guidelines for thermal, thermochemical, and photoelectrochemical energy conversion reactors through multi-physics modeling and demonstrations. Her research interests include: thermal sciences and radiative transfer, fluid dynamics, charge transfer, and thermo/electro/photochemistry in complex multi-phase media on multiple scales.

Prof. Ishitani has been interested in artificial photosynthesis for a long time. His group has developed molecular technologies for metal-complex photocatalysts for CO2 reduction and hybridized them with various solid materials. He recently succeeded to construct Z-scheme photocatalytic systems which efficiently reduce CO2 by using water as a reductant and visible light as an energy source, and photocatalytic and electrocatalytic systems for direct reduction of low concentration CO2.He warded many prizes such as The Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ) Award, The Asian and Oceanian Photochemistry Association (APA) Award, and FRSC.

Erwin Reisner is the Professor of Energy and Sustainability and holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. His team’s cross-disciplinary research into solar chemistry and circular chemical technologies focuses on the capture and utilisation of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide as well as the valorisation of plastics and biomass waste to produce green fuels and chemicals for a net zero future.

Prof. Beatriz Roldan Cuenya is Director of the Interface Science Department of the Fritz-Haber Institute of the Max-Planck Society in Berlin since 2017. She received her PhD in solid state physics from the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) in 2001. Her postdoctoral research took her to the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara (USA). In 2004 she joined the Department of Physics at the University of Central Florida (UCF) as Assistant Professor becoming a full professor in 2012. From 2013-2017 she worked as Professor of Physics at the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany).
She is the author of 237 peer-reviewed publications, 6 book chapters, and 6 patents and serves in the editorial board of the Journal of Catalysis and the Chemical Reviews journal.

Prof. Xinchen Wang, Vice President of Fuzhou University, P.R. China, and Director of the State Key Laboratory of Photocatalysis on Energy and Environment, earned his PhD from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2005. He was a JSPS post-doctoral fellow at Tokyo University in 2006, and an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany, from 2007 to 2012. A Fellow of The Royal Society of Chemistry (UK) since 2015, he became a distinguished Changjiang Scholar in 2016 (China). He pioneered carbon nitride photocatalysis, advancing applications in water splitting, CO2 reduction, and more, with over 340 peer-reviewed publications in top journals.

Peidong Yang is a Chemistry professor, S. K. and Angela Chan Distinguished Chair Professor in Energy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Yang received his B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Science and Technology in China in 1993. He then received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1997 and did his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Soon after, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. He received numerous awards, including the Global Energy Prize, MacArthur Fellowship, E. O. Lawrence Award, Alan T. Waterman Award, MRS Medal, ACS Baekeland Medal, and Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics.  He is the 2014 Thomas Reuters Citation Laureate for Physics.

Andy is a Royal Society Professor and the Director of the Materials Innovation Factory. His research interests span functional materials, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI). In 2020, he led a team that built the world’s first AI-powered mobile ‘robotic chemist’ (Nature, 2020, 583, 237). He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015, and was awarded the 2021 Super AI Leadership award, an international prize in artificial intelligence, previously won by IBM Research.  
 
Andy was founding Director of the Centre for Materials Discovery (2007–2015) and led the bid to establish the Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) in 2017. He is MIF’s first Academic Director. He is also the Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Functional Materials Design, and since 2024, co-Director of AIChemy, the EPSRC-funded UK hub for AI in physical sciences.

Dr. Haining Tian is a full professor in Physical Chemistry at Uppsala University, leading a research group of Molecular Devices for Artificial Photosynthesis. He received his PhD in Applied Chemistry at Dalian University of Technology in 2009 and then moved to Royal Institute of Technology as Postdoc and senior researcher. In 2014 he joined the faculty at Uppsala University as an assistant professor becoming a full professor in 2024. He has been awarded Göran Gustafsson Prize for young researchers, Young Investigator from European Photochemistry Association and Wallenberg Academy Fellow. His research interests focus on development and investigation of sustainable soft materials including molecules and polymers for solar energy conversion and storage.

Prof. Junwang (John) Tang is a Member of the Academy of Europe, a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow, Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Fellow of IMM and Honorary fellow of CCS. He is the Founding Director of Industrial Catalysis Center in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chair Professor of Materials Chemistry and Catalysis at Tsinghua University, China and a Visiting Professor at University College London, UK.
 
Tang concentrates on Renewable Energy-to-Chemicals by coupling photons with phonons, involving small molecule activation to produce zero-carbon fuels (eg. H2O to H2, N2 to NH3) and valuable chemicals (CO2 to alcohols and CH4 to C2+ hydrocarbons) as well as microwave-catalysed plastic recycling, together with the investigation of the underlying charge dynamics and kinetics by state-of-the-art spectroscopies, resulting in ~250 papers published in Nature Catalysis, Nature Energy, Nature Materials, Nature Reviews Materials, Chemical Reviews, Chem. Soc. Rev., Nature Commu., JACS, Angew Chemie etc. with ~31,000 citations. Prof. Tang has received many awards, the latest of which is the 2022 IChemE Oil and Gas Global Awards, 2021 IChemE Andrew Medal, 2021 the RSC Corday-Morgan Prize and 2021 Royal Society-Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship etc. He also sits on the Editorial Board of 6 international journals, eg. the Editor of Applied Catalysis B and Associate Editor of EES Solar, Chin. Journal of Catalysis and Carbon Future etc.

Professor Raffaella Buonsanti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at EPFL. She leads a multidisciplinary research program which spans from nanoscience to materials chemistry and electrocatalysis.  She has received an ERC Starting Grant in 2016 and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2022 in addition to numerous awards, including the Swiss Chemical Society Werner Price in 2021, the European Chemical Society Lecture Award and the Royal Chemical Society ChemComm Emerging Investigator Lectureship in 2019, the ACS Inorganic Nanoscience Award in 2024. She is also an Associate Editor of ACS Catalysis.

Fatwa F. Abdi is an Associate Professor in the School of Energy and Environment, City University of Hong Kong (CityU HK). He obtained his PhD (cum laude) in Chemical Engineering from TU Delft, the Netherlands, in 2013, and he was the recipient of the Martinus van Marum prize from the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences and Humanities. Prior to joining CityU HK in 2023, he was a group leader and the deputy head of Institute for Solar Fuels, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, Germany. His research group is interested in the development of materials and engineering of devices for solar-to-chemical conversion applications. His group focuses on complex metal oxides with activities spanning from investigating their fundamental material properties to implementing bulk and surface modification strategies to overcome their limitations. At the same time, his group utilizes the combination of multiphysics modeling and validation experiments to identify challenges associated with device engineering.

Jillian L. Dempsey is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and currently holds the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professorship. She is the Deputy Director of the Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels (CHASE). Her research group explores charge transfer processes associated with solar fuel production, including proton-coupled electron transfer reactions and electron transfer across interfaces. Her research bridges molecular and materials chemistry and relies heavily on methods of physical inorganic chemistry, including transient absorption spectroscopy and electrochemistry. She also dedicates time to advancing electrochemistry education for all chemists.

James Durrant is Professor of Photochemistry in the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London and Sêr Cymru Solar Professor, College of Engineering, University of Swansea. His research focuses on the use of transient spectroscopies to investigate the function of new materials for sustainable energy conversion, including materials for artificial photosynthesis, solar cells and electrolysis. More widely, as part of the SPECIFIC IKC, he leads the EPSRC programme grant ATIP, and at Imperial leads its Centre for Processable Electronics (the CPE). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2017 and appointed a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for services to photochemistry and solar energy research in 2022.

Yannis is Head of Water and Environmental Engineering Group (WEEG). 

Yannis has >20 years’ experience in research, teaching and training. His focus is on waste utilisation and energy autonomy and produced the EcoBot family of robots powered by microbial fuel cells (MFCs) fed with organic waste, with the latest achievement being Row-bot. He was an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellow (2010-2015) and is currently a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation PI on the "Urine-tricity/PEE POWER®" project, which is advancing the MFC technology for sanitation improvement in Developing World Countries. Yannis is Vice-Chair of the EU COST Action, PHOENIX, looking at environmental remediation using bioelectrochemical systems – a line of work he also led for the EU FET OPEN “Living Architecture” project and its follow-on Innovation Action ALICE, now part of the European Innovation Council. His research income in the past 12 years is >£6M and has published >150 peer reviewed journal articles.

Marcella Bonchio started her scientific career as a research associate of the National Council of Research (CNR), and then in Princeton University (NJ, USA) collaborating with John T. Groves on bio-inspired catalysis. She was promoted to Full-Professor of Organic Chemistry in 2013 at the University of Padova, where she served as Vice-Rector for Research in 2015-2021. Research awards include the 2021 “Lombardia è Ricerca” 1ME prize for breakthrough strategies in Artificial Photosynthesis applied to renewable energy. She is elected Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences (EurASc) since 2020

Robert Hoye is an Associate Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford, where he is also a Fellow of St. John’s College and a Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellow. Prof. Hoye completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge (2012-2014). Afterwards, he was a postdoc at MIT (2015-2016), before returning to the University of Cambridge as a College Research Fellow (2016-2019). In 2020, he moved to Imperial College London as a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer (Aug. 2022 -). In Oct. 2022, he moved to Oxford as Associate Professor. Prof. Hoye’s group focuses on developing inorganic semiconductors for energy applications, particularly focussing on lead-free perovskite-inspired materials. His group’s research spans from fundamentals (including spectroscopy and computations) to materials synthesis and applications in photovoltaics, light-emitting diodes and detectors. 

Libby is a Professor of Energy Materials at Newcastle University. Research in her group focuses on developing materials and devices for sustainable power, fuel and feedstocks. This involves materials development, device assembly and characterization of the underpinning photophysics and electrochemistry. Her current roles include being the academic lead for the Northern Net Zero Accelerator PB-IAA, the EPSRC Northeast Transient Absorption Spectroscopy & Microscopy Facility, Institution Director of the EPSRC CDT Renewable Energy at Northeast Universities (ReNU), and she is the engagement lead for the UKRI Interdisciplinary Centre for Circular Chemical Economy.