Sascha is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Physical Chemistry and Head of the Laboratory for Energy Materials at EPFL (Switzerland), while he is also maintaining strong ties with the Harvard community and in particular Winthrop House which he regularly visits as NRT and SCR member.

His team employs light-matter interactions to understand the next generation of soft semiconductors with the overarching goal of maximizing energy efficiency for a sustainable future by unlocking applications ranging from flexible light-weight solar cells & displays all the way to entirely new applications in quantum information processing.

Previously, he was a research group leader and Rowland Fellow at Harvard University. Before starting his lab at Harvard, Sascha studied Chemistry at Heidelberg University (Germany) and completed a PhD in Physics at the University of Cambridge (UK), where he subsequently worked as EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow.

Prof. Marina Freitag is a Professor of Energy and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Newcastle University. She is developing new light-driven technologies that incorporate coordination polymers to solve the most important challenges in the research area, including issues of sustainability, stability and performance of hybrid PV. The development of such highly innovative concepts has given Marina international recognition, including recipient of the prestigious 2022 Royal Society of Chemistry Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize 2022.

Her research into hybrid molecular devices, began during her doctoral studies (2007-2011, Rutgers University, NJ, USA) where she was awarded an Electrochemical Society Travel Award and Dean Dissertation Fellowship 2011. Dr Freitag moved to Uppsala University (2013-2015) for a postdoctoral research position, which focused on the implementation of alternative redox mediators, leading to a breakthrough today known as “zombie solar cells”. Dr Freitag was invited to further develop this work at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) with Prof. Anders Hagfeldt ( 2015-2016). From 2016-2020 she was appointed as Assistant Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she received the Göran Gustaffsson Young Researcher Award 2019.

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.