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.