Electrochemistry plays a focal role in the development of better and more efficient catalytic processes for the use of electricity to form or break chemical bonds. This discipline is closely associated with the development of new renewable energy solutions, such as energy storage (electrolysers, ammonia and other renewable fuels) and chemical production (from CO2 or biomass). In particular, electrocatalysis has allowed in recent years to achieve significant development on material development and reaction optimization for processes aiming at the synthesis of value-added chemicals and renewable fuels. With this symposium, we want to highlight the scientific excellence in this field. We will bring together the researchers that are currently leading topics such as CO2 electrochemical conversion, electrochemical ammonia synthesis, electrochemical activation and conversion of methane, and electrosynthesis of high-value chemicals. We aim at a symposium with several renowned keynote speakers, excellent invited speakers followed by a session of contributed talks, with ample time for questions and discussions. We will strongly encourage abstract submission for contributed talks and Posters, which will allow for a wide variety of researchers to share their exciting work. We will ensure the diversity of our speakers.
- Materials and electrochemistry of carbon dioxide reduction
- Electrocatalytic synthesis of high-value compounds: new routes and materials
- lectrochemistry for the valorization of biomass
- Materials and electrochemistry of N-containing compounds
- Materials and electrochemistry of methane activation and conversion
Corina Andronescu received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University Politehnica of Bucharest (Romania) in 2009 and 2011, respectively. Her Ph.D. title she received from the same university in 2014. In 2016 she joined the group of Prof. W. Schuhmann (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany) first as postdoctoral researcher and later as group leader. December 2018, she was appointed Junior Professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen, where she is currently leading the group of Electrochemical Catalysis in the Faculty of Chemistry. Her research interests include development of hybrid electrocatalysts for the CO2 electroreduction reaction, alcohol electrooxidation as well as investigation of electrocatalysts at nanoscale using Scanning Electrochemical Cell Microscopy.
Marta Hatzell is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to starting at Georgia Tech in August of 2015, she was a Post-Doctoral researcher in the Department of Material Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois - Urbana-Campaign. During her post doc, she worked in the Braun Research group on research at the interface between colloid science and electrochemistry. She completed her PhD at Penn state University in the Logan Research Group. Her PhD explored environmental technology for energy generation and water treatment. During graduate school she was an NSF and PEO Graduate Research Fellow.
Currently her research group focuses on exploring the role photochemistry and electrochemistry may play in future sustainable systems. She is an active member of the American Chemical Society, the Electrochemical Society, ASEEP, AICHE, and ASME. Dr. Hatzell has also been awarded the NSF Early CAREER award in 2019, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Chemistry in 2020, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2020, the ECS Toyota Young Investigator award in 2021, and the Moore Inventor Fellow in 2021.
Marc T.M. Koper is Professor of Surface Chemistry and Catalysis at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He received his PhD degree (1994) from Utrecht University (The Netherlands) in the field of electrochemistry. He was an EU Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ulm (Germany) and a Fellow of Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) at Eindhoven University of Technology, before moving to Leiden University in 2005. His main research interests are in fundamental aspects of electrocatalysis, proton-coupled electron transfer, theoretical electrochemistry, and electrochemical surface science.
I am currently an Full Professor at the University of Bonn (Germany), Department of Chemistry. My overarching motivation is to discover and implement the chemistry necessary to transition to a sustainable energy-based society. Specifically, I am developing materials to convert electrical energy to fuels and chemicals.
Dr. Samira Siahrostami is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Chemistry at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Prior to that, she was an associate professor (2022-2023) and assistant professor (2018-2022) in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Calgary. Prior to that, she was a research engineer (2016–2018) and postdoctoral researcher (2014–2016) at Stanford University's Department of Chemical Engineering. She also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Denmark from 2011 to 2013. Her work uses computational techniques such as density functional theory to model reactions at (electro)catalyst surfaces. Her goal is to develop more efficient catalysts for fuel cells, electrolyzers, and batteries by comprehending the kinetics and thermodynamics of reactions occurring at the surface of (electro)catalysts. Dr. Siahrostami has written more than 100 peer-reviewed articles with an h-index of 47 and over 13,000 citations. She has received numerous invitations to give talks at universities, conferences, and workshops around the world on various topics related to catalysis science and technology. Dr. Siahrostami is the recipient of the Environmental, Sustainability, and Energy Division Horizon Prize: John Jeyes Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in 2021. She received the Tom Zeigler Award and the Waterloo Institute in Nanotechnology Rising Star award in 2023. She has been named as an emerging investigator by the RSC in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Dr. Siahrostami's contribution to energy research was recognized in the most recent Virtual Issue of ACS Energy Letters as one of the Women at the forefront of energy research in 2023. She is currently the board member of the Canadian Catalysis Foundation and editor of Chemical Engineering Journal (CEJ) and APL Energy journal (AIP Publishing).
Ifan is a Professor in Electrochemistry at the Department of Materials at Imperial College: he leads the Interfacial Electrochemistry Group there and is also Atoms to Devices Research Area Lead at the Henry Royce Institute.
Ifan joined Imperial College in July 2017. Prior to Imperial, he was at the Department of Physics at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU); he was first employed as a postdoctoral researcher, then as assistant professor and finally as associate professor and leader of the Electrocatalysis Group there. In 2015, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) appointed Ifan as the Peabody Visiting Associate Professor. He taught and conducted research at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT for a whole semester.
Ifan’s research aims to enable the large-scale electrochemical conversion of renewable energy to fuels and valuable chemicals and vice versa. Such processes will be critical in order to allow the increased uptake of renewable energy. His focus is on the catalyst at the electrode, i.e. the electrocatalyst. It turns out that the electrocatalyst material defines the efficiency of several important electrochemical processes, including:(i) electrolysis for the storage of renewable electricity — which is inherently intermittent — in the form of fuels, such as hydrogen or alcohols.(ii) fuel cells as a potentially zero emission source of power for automotive vehicles. (iii) the green synthesis of valuable chemicals, such as ammonia and H2O2. (iv) batteries, which tend to degrade by gas evolution at the electrode-electrolyte interface. Hence the reactions that need to be accelerated in electrolysers and fuel cells — such as CO2, CO, O2 and H2 evolution — are precisely those that need to be inhibited in batteries.
Ifan has discovered or co-discovered several new catalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction, which exhibited significant improvements in performance over the prior state-of-the-art. In particular, his research on hydrogen peroxide production led to the establishment of the spinout company, HP Now.
Ifan is the recipient of RSC's Geoffrey Barker Medal (2024), the RSC's John Jeyes Award (2021). He also currently holds an European Resarch Council Consolidator Grant (2021-2025). Since 2022, he has been a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher.