Professor Pratibha Sharma

Professor Pratibha Sharma is Cummins Chair Professor in the Department of Energy Science and Engineering and Associate Dean (Academic Programmes) at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Her research interests include hydrogen storage materials and systems, and hydrogen utilization for stationary and vehicular applications. She has worked on various types of hydrides like chemical, complex and metal hydrides for solid state hydrogen storage, their modifications, catalysis, support and tailoring the reactions mechanisms.  On the systems side, she has been working on simulation, design and development of hydrogen storage reactors for various applications. She has supervised 16 PhD students, 40 M.Tech and M.Sc. students. She has more than 105 International journal publications and several patents to her credit.  Professor Sharma is leading several multi-institutional R&D projects on Hydrogen systems development and integration for different applications. These projects have several IITs and industries as partner which are working together for hydrogen-based solutions. A centre on Hydrogen Energy Systems research is established at IIT Bombay and she is leading the activities. She has developed four research laboratories at IIT Bombay. She is having both national and international collaborations in terms of publications, student exchange and joint research projects. She is in the expert panel of various funding agencies of the Government of India and on the national advisory group of National Green Hydrogen Mission(NGHM).  

She has developed various hydrogen storage technologies based on solid state method and have demonstrated proof of concept for vehicular applications and backup power etc. All the materials and systems have been indigenously developed and can reduce cost by 95%. The systems developed are compact, safe, operate at optimum temperature and pressure and are cost effective and energy efficient. 

Professor Peter Wasserscheid

Peter Wasserscheid heads the Institute of Chemical Reaction Engineering of Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) and is director at the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nuremberg for Renewable Energy, a part of Forschungszentrum Jülich. Peter studied chemistry at the RWTH Aachen and finished his PhD in 1998. After an industrial postdoc with BP Chemicals completed his habilitation at RWTH Aachen in 2002 and he joined FAU in 2003. The position of Director of the Helmholtz Institute was added to his responsibilities in 2014. Since November 2021, Peter also works at the Institute for Sustainable Hydrogen Economy (INW) at the Jülich Research Centre, where he acts as head of the ‘Reaction Technology for Chemical Hydrogen Storage’ department. The key research interests of the Wasserscheid research group centre on catalyst material development and reaction engineering aspects of multiphase catalytic processes. A speciela focus is on hydrogenation and dehydrogenation processes in the context of chemical energy storage. Worldwide, the team belongs to the top research teams in developing chemical hydrogen storage systems, in particular the use of Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carrier (LOHC) systems. The group develops this technology for stationary and mobile applications. These efforts include catalyst and reactor developments, systems design and engineering as well as the development of larger scale demonstrators. His research efforts have earned him a number of awards including the Leibniz Award of the German Science Foundation in 2006 and two Advanced Investigator Grants of the European Research Council in 2010 and 2018. He has published more than 500 peer reviewed scientific papers that have been cited more than 55.000 times and has contributed as inventor to 120 patent families.

Professor Peta Ashworth

Professor Peta Ashworth is the Director of Curtin University’s Institute for Energy Transition. She is a renowned expert in energy, communication, stakeholder engagement, and technology assessment. Professor Ashworth has researched public attitudes towards climate and energy technologies, including wind, carbon capture and storage (CCS), solar photovoltaic, storage, geothermal and hydrogen, for almost two decades.

Dr Jenny Hayward

Dr Jenny Hayward is a principal research scientist in CSIRO. She leads research projects on technology cost projections and the models she has developed are used to project the cost of electricity generation technologies for the Australian Energy Market Operator and the Australian Government. Her focus is on developing new methods and modelling approaches to provide robust projections of the capital costs of existing and emerging electricity generation and fuel conversion technologies. Jenny is also the Chair of the Technical Advisory Group of Mission Innovation, a global initiative to accelerate progress in clean energy technologies.

Dr Andrew Feitz

Dr Andrew Feitz is an environmental engineer and Director of Energy Initiatives and Advice at the Australian Government’s national geoscience agency, Geoscience Australia.  Prior to joining Geoscience Australia in 2008, Andrew was a senior researcher in environmental treatment technologies at UNSW and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.  Andrew leads Geoscience Australia’s technical advice on hydrogen and geological storage of CO2. He has served on a number of technical advisory committees and leads Hydrogen Assessments under the Australian Government’s new Resourcing Australia’s Prosperity initiative, including assessing Australia’s underground hydrogen storage and green iron potential.

Dr Mitchell Scovell

Mitchell Scovell is a Research Scientist in the Sustainability Pathways Program at CSIRO Environment. With a background in psychology, he applies quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how people think and respond to environmental changes. Since joining CSIRO, his work has concentrated on explaining public and community attitudes toward energy technologies like hydrogen, large-scale renewables, and coal seam gas. A key focus of his current research is the development and application of quantitative methods to better understand the psychosocial drivers behind community responses to new and existing energy industries.

Professor Sally Brooker

Distinguished Professor Sally Brooker (MNZM, FRSNZ, FRSC) studied at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand [BSc(Hons) first class; PhD with Professor Vickie McKee]. After postdoctoral research at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany, with Professor George M. Sheldrick, she took up a Lectureship at the University of Otago where she is now a full Professor. She has received numerous awards, including a Queens Birthday Honour for services to science (MNZM), the Hector Medal (RSNZ), the Burrows Award (RACI), Francis Lions Memorial Lecturer (Sydney), and in 2019 she was named one of seven Inaugural Sesquicentennial Distinguished Professors (Otago).
Her research interests concern the design, synthesis and full characterisation of, primarily paramagnetic, di- and poly-metallic complexes of transition metal and lanthanide ions with polydentate acyclic and macrocyclic ligands, as these have interesting redox, magnetic, catalytic and photophysical properties (otago.ac.nz/brooker). Sally is a principal investigator with the MacDiarmid Institute, and some of her research team are making catalysts for green hydrogen production from water, as well as for the selective reduction of carbon dioxide. Most relevant to this invited lecture, she is co-leading the German-NZ green hydrogen centre / He Honoka Hauwai, which has participants across NZ-D, including iwi and industry partners, who are active across all aspects of green hydrogen (production, storage, uses, modelling, etc).

Dr Emanuelle Frery

Dr Emanuelle Frery is a pricipal research scientist leading a research team at the CSIRO, the Australian Science institute. Her team focus on natural hydrogen systems and CCS with a multidisciplinary approach, from the lab to the field. She acquired a worldwide academic expertise in structural geology with a PhD thesis on the fluid and gas circulation along natural faults recorded in the well-known red sandstone of the Colorado Plateau and her implication in the IODP research on active serpentinite mud volcanoes. She is an expert of risk assessment of energy production impact on the environment and socio-economical assets and acted as deputy lead in the $34.5 million GBA programme. She is the AFRAN WA Hub leader and a member of the IEA Hydrogen TCP committee on natural hydrogen - task 49. 

Dr John V Kennedy

Dr. John V. Kennedy is an internationally recognized materials scientist specialising in advanced materials for low-carbon energy technologies. His research employs ion beam techniques, pioneered by Lord Rutherford, to elucidate structure–property relationships and to engineer functional materials for hydrogen production and storage, and energy-efficient technologies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ) and an Adjunct Professor at Victoria University of Wellington. Dr. Kennedy also serves as Programme Director of the MBIE Advanced Energy Technology initiative Aotearoa: Green Hydrogen Technology Platform, which develops clean technologies for hydrogen production from non-pure water and builds New Zealand’s hydrogen capability.

Professor Hiroshige Matsumoto

Dr. Hiroshige Matsumoto is a Professor, Associate Director, and Lead Principal Investigator at the Advanced Energy Conversion Systems Thrust, International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research (WPI-I2CNER), Kyushu University. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Chemistry from The University of Tokyo. He previously served as a research associate at Nagoya University and Tohoku University, and later as an Associate Professor at Kyushu University before assuming his current position. His research focuses on solid-state electrochemistry for environment and energy, including proton-conducting ceramics, water/steam electrolysis, fuel cells, and nanoionics.

Associate Professor Michael Pereira

Michael Pereira is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the School of Engineering at Deakin University, Australia, where he is also Melbourne (Burwood) Campus Lead for the School of Engineering the Deputy Director of the Hycel Technology Hub.Michael has a Bachelor of Aerospace Engineering from RMIT University, Australia. He earned his PhD from Deakin University in 2010, focusing on advanced manufacturing in the automotive industry. Since then, he has held various research and academic roles at Deakin, including receiving an Australian Research Council Industry Postdoctoral Fellowship. Passionate about engineering education, Michael emphasizes project-based teaching methods to equip students with practical problem-solving skills for their future careers. His current research centres on hydrogen fuel cells and electrolysers, including modelling and testing PEM fuel cells, manufacturing bipolar plates, and designing manufacturing processes. 

Professor Anrej Atrens

Professor Andrej Atrens's research interests are in the service performance of engineering materials and alloy development.

He received a PhD from the University of Adelaide in 1976, a DEng from the University of Queensland in 1997, and became FHEA in 2018.He is an Emeritus Professor in Materials Engineering and has been at University of Queensland since 1984. 

His current research projects are in the fields of:

• Mg Corrosion
• SCC
• Hydrogen embrittlement

Professor Sandra Kentish

Sandra Kentish is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. She is an Editor of the Journal of Membrane Science and was awarded the Membrane Society of Australasia Anita Hill Leadership Award in 2022. As a project leader within the Future Fuels Co-operative Research Centre, she has developed novel pipeline coatings to reduce hydrogen embrittlement. More broadly, her work focuses on the use of polymeric membranes with an electrical driving force for a range of applications including hydrogen production and storage. This work moves from the very fundamentals of ion sorption to pilot plant trials of electrodialysis technology. 

Dr Joel Sarout

Dr Joel Sarout is principal research scientist at CSIRO and adjunct A/prof at Curtin University. He leads CSIRO’s Geomechanics and Multi-physics research group and is associate editor for the AGU’s Journal of Geophysical Research-Solid Earth, and for the ASTM’s Geotechnical Testing Journal. He holds a MSc in subsurface geo-engineering (University of Minnesota, 2003), and a PhD in Earth sciences (Ecole Normale Supérieure, 2006). His expertise lies in rock physics, geomechanics and geophysics, with 15+ years of experience with industry/government-funded projects to better understand and predict the impact of anthropogenic activities in the energy/resources sector, e.g., CO2 geo-sequestration, hydrogen geo-storage, and exploration for natural hydrogen. 

Professor John Andrews

Professor John Andrews has been involved in sustainable energy for over fifty years, and hydrogen energy for over twenty years. He is a primary developer of Unitised Regenerative Fuel Cells (URFCs) and inventor of proton battery/flow reactor technologies. He has taken these novel hydrogen technologies from fundamental research concepts through to prototypes prior to commercial manufacture over a period of more than two decades. He has recently led two major prototyping projects at RMIT University: on URFCs funded by Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator, Australian Department of Defence ($3.2 million); and proton batteries/flow reactors funded by Eldor Corporation (Italy) ($2.1 million).

Professor Geoffrey Brooks

Professor Brooks is a Professor in the School of Engineering. Since completing his PhD in 1994, Professor Brooks has been an Senior Lecturer at the University of Wollongong (1993-2000), an Associate Professor at McMaster University (2000-2004), a Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO (2004-2006) and a Professor at Swinburne since 2006.

Since joining Swinburne, Professor Brooks has been the Associate Dean of Research, Head of Mathematics at Swinburne and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Future Manufacturing). He currently co-ordinates research for Extra Terrestrial processing at the University and a Program Leader in the ARC Steel Innovation Hub. He has also been active in recent years working with Physicists on Dark Matter detection research. Professor Brooks has published over 250 papers on fundamental aspects of steelmaking, aluminium production and materials processing in general. He has won significant international awards from the TMS, AIST, ASM and IOM3 for his contribution to metallurgical processing. Professor Brooks is a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (UK).

Professor Eric May

Eric May is Managing Director of the Future Energy Exports (FEnEx) CRC and works closely with industry, conducting research projects in hydrogen liquefaction, LNG production, gas separations, CCS and fluid property prediction. Eric was named the 2021 Western Australian Scientist of the Year and was awarded one of the 2012 Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science. He has a spin-out company commercialising patented technologies to capture methane from coal mines and land-fill gas.

Professor Graham Nathan

Gus Nathan is a Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Adelaide, a Fellow of both the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and of the Combustion Institute, a recipient of a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council and an ATSE KH Sutherland medallist. He was the bid leader for, and is now the Research Director of, the national Heavy Industry Low-carbon Transition Cooperative Research Centre, the HILT CRC. He has led the development of six technology platforms, three of which are in ongoing commercial use within high temperature processes such as iron pellets, cement and lime kilns and alumina calciners, while three are currently being upscaled to decarbonise heavy industry. He has worked closely with industry throughout his career and is the founding chair of the international High Temperature Minerals Processing (HiTeMP) Forum. He has published some 350 papers in international journals, 250 in peer reviewed conferences, 50 commissioned reports and 13 patents.

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