Professor Andreas Löschel

Professor Andreas Löschel is Chair of Environmental/Resource Economics and Sustainability at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Since 2011, he has been Chairman of the Expert Commission for the Federal Government to monitor the energy transition and, since 2024, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Initiative “Energy Systems of the Future” (ESYS) of the German academies of science (acatech, Leopoldina and Union of Academies). Andreas Löschel was lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the 5th and 6th Assessment Reports, where he was responsible for the chapters on climate mitigation pathways and energy systems. 

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

Professor Peter Wasserscheid holds a Chair for Chemical Reaction Engineering at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg and is Director of the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nuremberg.

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.

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 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.

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 

Professor Anthony O'Mullan

Anthony O’Mullane received his BSc Chemistry degree (1997) and PhD degree (2001) from University College Cork (Ireland). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (FRACI) and Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences (FQAS). He has published over 260 journal articles in the areas of electrochemical and materials science. He is currently an Associate Editor with ACS Electrochemistry and Editorial Board Member of ChemElectroChem and ChemPhysChem.

He is a Professor of Electrochemistry at QUT who works on developing materials with energy and environmental remediation applications including electrochemical water splitting to produce green hydrogen, CO2 conversion and electrosynthesis of ammonia.

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. 

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).

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Speaker 14 biography