Li-ion batteries are the dominant energy storage systems in electrified transportation, modern technology as well as renewable energy storage. However, these batteries require the use of scarce, toxic and unethically resourced materials for their fabrication. This pushes the need to develop novel and improved technologies, with an important consideration in their sustainability. This symposium focuses on batteries that not rely on toxic and/or scarce material aligned to sustainable development goal SDG 7 (affordable and clean energy) and/or SDG 13 (climate action). A clear example in this case it is Na batteries, but not limited to. The focus of this symposium is to bring together experts from around the world to discuss the latest advancements in battery technologies and their impact on the future landscape of energy. During the symposium, speakers will present recent research and developments in next-generation of sustainable batteries (e.g. sodium/potassium-based batteries, organic/polymer batteries, multivalent (Mg, Zn, Ca…) batteries, etc). Key topics such as safety, eco-design & recycling and environmental sustainability will also be addressed.
The next-generation battery symposium is a unique opportunity for researchers, engineers, and energy experts to exchange knowledge and experiences on the latest sustainable battery technologies and establish connections for future collaborations and projects.
- Sodium/potassium batteries
- Multivalent batteries (eg. Mg, Zn, Ca…)
- Organic/polymer batteries
- Aqueous rechargeable batteries
- Sustainability, eco-design and battery recycling
Dr. Rebeca Marcilla received her PhD in Chemistry in 2006 from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in the field of ionic liquids and polymers with application in electrochemistry and nanotechnology. After a postdoctoral stay at the University College London she joined CIDETEC (Centro de Tecnologías Electroquímicas, Donostia-San Sebastian). In 2010 she moved to the Unit of Electrochemical Processes IMDEA Energy (Madrid) and in 2015 she became Senior Researcher. During her fruitful scientific career, she has acquired proven experience in advanced materials for energy storage (eg. ionic liquids, polymer electrolytes, redox-active polymers, etc) and in next-generation batteries including organic batteries and redox flow batteries). As a result, she has co-authored 7 patents (1 of them licensed to a private company) and published more around 120 articles, achieving an h-index of 46. She has supervised 12 PhD thesis (6 presented+6 on-going) and several postdoctoral researchers. In 2017, she was awarded with a ERC Consolidator Grant to develop Membrane-free Redox Flow Batteries. Dr. Marcilla is member of the Governing Board of the Electrochemistry Group of the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry (GEE-RSEQ) and Editor of Journal Power Sources.
A/Prof. Pozo-Gonzalo is a CSIC Principal Researcher, working at the Carboquimica Institute (Spain) and an honorary Associate Professor at Deakin University (Melbourne) working on sustainable energy storage materials and technologies. She attained her Degree and honours at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). After graduating, she received her PhD degree in Chemistry from the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) working with Prof. Peter J. Skabara on the electrochemical synthesis of Conducting Polymers. From 2004, she joined the Centre for Electrochemical Technologies in San Sebastian, (Spain) as the Head of Electrooptical unit where she stayed for 7 years. After moving to Australia, she has been working with Prof. Alan Bond at Monash University and in 2012 she joined Deakin University where she has been working in reversible metal air battery with advanced electrolytes, ionic liquids funded by ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES).
Since 2018, she has been focusing on circular economy in energy materials, working on the recovery of critical raw materials from end of life devices using sustainable methods, as well as redesign of materials for energy. At Deakin University, she is also a theme champion for energy materials as part of the University’s Circular Economy mission pillar. She is a board member of the Journal Sustainable Chemistry and Associate Editor of RSC sustainability. During her research career, she has authored and co-authored 112 peer-review international publications, 3 book chapters and holds 5 patents, in the areas of electrochemistry, circular economy and energy storage. She has supervised 11 Postdoctoral Research Fellows, 14 PhD students (9 to completion, 5 current), and 11 undergraduate students. She has led a total of 36 projects, 14 of them with industry partners, and 5 prestigious European funded projects within different calls STRP-FP6, FP7-NMP, RISE generating a total income of more than AU$4M.
Robert Dominko is a Research Professor at the National Institute of Chemistry and a Professor at the University of Ljubljana. He is the head of the battery group at the National Institute of Chemistry and deputy director of the ALISTORE-ERI network. He obtained his Ph.D. in Materials sciences in 2002 from the University of Ljubljana. Since his Ph.D. study, his research interests are in the field of materials science and electrochemical systems for energy storage, with main activities in the field of modern battery systems. Between 2009 and 2010 he worked in UPJV, Amiens, where he started the development of Li-S batteries. He was the coordinator of two large-scale EU projects focused on the development of Li-S batteries. His current research interests are focused on different types of multivalent batteries and the implementation of smart functionalities in battery cells. He is strongly connected with the Battery 2030+ initiative and with Batteries Europe, where he is one of the co-leaders of the task force preparing a strategy on the education level. He is involved in the MESC master program (https://mesc-plus.eu/) and in the doctoral school DESTINY (https://www.destiny-phd.eu/). He is a member of the Slovenian Academy of Engineering.
Since the 1st of October 2023, Sonia Dsoke holds a Professorship for “Electrochemical Energy Carriers and Storage” at the Department of Sustainable Systems Engineering (INATECH), University of Freiburg, she leads a group “Innovative Battery Materials” at Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) and she is member of the Freiburger material center (FMF).
At the international level, she is the chair of Division 3 (electrochemical energy conversion and storage) of the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE), one of the largest electrochemical communities in the world.
From 2017 until September 2023 Sonia Dsoke was the leader of a multidisciplinary group at the Institute for Applied Materials – Energy Storage Systems (KIT, Germany). In the same period, she was the deputy director of the platform CELEST and a spokesperson for Research Unit A (electrode materials) in the Cluster of Excellence POLiS dealing with “post-lithium” battery research. Previously she led an independent young research group focused on designing novel electrodes for Hydrid Battery-Supercapacitors at ZSW-Ulm (Germany). She also had industrial experience at an Italian battery manufacturing company FAAM (in 2009) and she was a researcher at the University of Camerino (Italy), where she also obtained her PhD in the field of Li-ion batteries.
Sonia Dsoke was honored with the Brigitte-Schlieben-Lange Programm Grant (2017-2019, Ministry of Science and Culture, Baden-Württemberg) and a Young Investigator Group Grant (2012-2016, Federal Ministry of Education and Research) within the framework “Energy Storage Initiative”.
Her actual main research subjects are the development of novel advanced functional materials for supercapacitors, lithium, and post-lithium ion batteries, with a special focus on tackling challenges of novel battery concepts such as Na, K, Mg, Ca, and Al batteries.
Dr. Fellinger is Head of the Division 3.6 Electrochemical Energy Materials at the German Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM). He is a nanostructure and molecular scientist by training (diploma at University of Kassel, DE), who received his PhD in colloid chemistry (with summa cum laude) at the University of Potsdam/DE under the direct supervision of Prof. Markus Antonietti in 2011. After a short postdoctoral stays at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Prof. Ichiro Yamanaka) he was a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam-Golm (2012-2017). In 2016/17 he was an awarded Researcher-in-Residence at Chalmers Institute of Technology in Gothenburg (Prof. Anders Palmqvist), followed by one term as W2-substitute professor for inorganic chemistry at the University of Applied Science Zittau/Görlitz. Afterwards until 2020 he joined Prof. Hubert Gasteiger´s Chair for Technical Electrochemistry (Technical University Munich) with a fuel cell project. In 2020 Dr. Fellinger´s group joined the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) in Berlin. Dr. Fellinger received the Donald-Ulrich Award 2017 of the International Sol-Gel Society and the Ernst-Haage Award for Chemistry of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion. His research interests are the synthetic chemistry of novel materials and their usage in energy-related applications with a focus on different carbon-based materials like nitrogen-doped carbons, M-N-C catalysts or hard carbon anodes. He has published ~60 articles in peer-reviewed journals (>6000 citations, H-index: 41).
Professor Maria Forsyth AM is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering. She is an Alfred Deakin Professo at Deakin University and an Ikerbasque Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. She has worked at the forefront of energy materials research since her Fulbright Research Fellowship in 1990 and has consistently made breakthrough discoveries in next-generation lithium and sodium battery technologies. Recognising a critical need for facilities to test new energy materials, Forsyth led the establishment of Deakin University’s Battery Research and Innovation Hub, a unique pre-commercial battery prototyping facility that supports over $20M R&D across a range of local and international industries. She has supervised over 100 PhD students and is a co-author of over 900 journal and conference publications that attracted more than 40000 citations.
Lee Johnson received his first degree from Newcastle University, after which he completed a PhD and post-PhD Fellowship in physical chemistry and electrochemistry at the University of Nottingham. He then joined the research group of Prof Sir P.G. Bruce FRS at the University of Oxford, where he studied the elementary processes taking place within the lithium-O2 battery. In 2017, he was awarded a Nottingham Research Fellowship, University of Nottingham, followed by an EPSRC Fellowship in 2018, both to support study of next-generation batteries. In 2019 he was promoted to Associate Professor in the School of Chemistry. His current research interests focus on understanding interfacial reactions, degradation, and charge transfer, in electrochemical energy devices.
Professor Emma Kendrick, CChem FIMMM FRSC FIMMM - Chair of Energy Materials, School of Metallurgy and Materials, University of Birmingham.
Prof Kendrick’s career to date has included industrial and academic roles leading to her current role as Chair of Energy Materials, where in addition to group lead of the energy materials group (EMG), she is co-director of the Centre for Energy Storage (BCES) and part of Birmingham Energy institute (BEI) and Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials (BCSECM). The EMG investigates sustainability in novel battery technologies from materials, manufacturing, performance and parameterisation, and recycling. Her recent work has led to a 2021 joint UoB - Imperial College London (ICL) spin out company, based around the methods of experimental parameterisation of applied multi-physics cell models, called About:Energy, for which she is founder and director.
Prior to UoB, she spent two years as Reader in WMG, University of Warwick. Before academia, she led innovations in the battery industry, latterly as Chief Technologist in Energy Storage at SHARP Laboratories of Europe Ltd (SLE) and prior to that for two lithium-ion battery SMEs, Fife Batteries Ltd and Surion Energy Ltd.
She is fellow of the Royal Society of chemistry (RSC) and Institute of Metals, Mining and Materials (IoM3). Recently, she has been recognised through several awards; 2021 Faraday Institution (FI) Researcher Development Champion, RSC 2021 Environment, Sustainability and Energy Division Mid-Career Award, and the 2019 Hothersall Memorial Award for outstanding services to Metal Finishing.
Prof Kendrick holds a PhD from Keele University, obtained as part of a postgraduate transfer partnership (PTP) scheme with CERAM Research, a MSc in new materials from the University of Aberdeen and a BSc in chemistry from the University of Manchester.
Dr. Nagore Ortiz-Vitoriano (https://cicenergigune.com/en/nagore-ortiz-vitoriano) is an Ikerbasque Research Associate, who has been spearheading metal-air research at CIC energiGUNE (Spain) since 2016, of which she became research line manager in 2018.
She obtained her doctorate in 2011 for her work on solid oxide fuel cells (University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Spain), during the course of which she undertook research stays at Risø DTU (Denmark) and Imperial College London (UK). In 2013 she was awarded a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship from the European Union, enabling her to join the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge (USA) where she worked with both lithium and sodium-air batteries. In 2015, she continued this fellowship at CIC energiGUNE, where she conducted research stays at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA), Deakin University (Australia) and Chalmers University (Sweden). Recently, she has been promoted to Ikerbasque Research Associate and granted the Ramon y Cajal fellowship financed by the European Commission's European Social Fund through the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Dr. Ortiz-Vitoriano has focused on both rational design of electrode and electrolyte materials for energy storage (e.g., solid oxide fuel cells, electrocatalysis, Na-ion and metal-air batteries), as well as fundamental research focused on elucidating key processes (by establishing relevant physiochemical models) in order to facilitate rapid future developments at both the material and system levels.
Dr. Minghao Yu, PI, holds an independent research group (Materials & Electrochemistry for Sustainable Energy Storage) at Technische Universität Dresden. His research interest includes 1) the development of novel organic and inorganic 2D layered materials, 2) the investigation of advanced artificial interphases and electrolytes for next-generation batteries, 3) fundamental charge and ion dynamics during electrochemical energy storage processes, and 4) sustainable energy storage device fabrication, including supercapacitors, hybrid-ion capacitors, aqueous batteries, dual-ion batteries, and multivalent metal (Zn, Mg, Al) batteries. He has published more than 140 scientific articles which have attracted 23,000+ citations with an H-index of 76 (Web of Science). Besides, he is also an associated member of the Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), an associated group leader at Max-Planck-Institut für Mikrostrukturphysik, a highly cited researcher (Clarivate Analytics, 2018-now), 2023 ERC Starting Grant winner, and a Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe.