Helge Goessling examines the functioning of the physical climate system and its predictability on scales from days to centuries. Since his graduation in biophysics at Humboldt University Berlin in 2008, global coupled climate models have been one of his main research tools. During his doctorate at the MPI for Meteorology 2009-2012, he researched the global water cycle and land-atmosphere interactions. Since 2012 at AWI, his focus has been on the prediction of sea ice conditions. His research also includes global aspects of climate change, extreme events, the earth's energy balance, and geo-engineering. Since 2022, Helge Goessling has been leading a joint project of the Helmholtz Earth-and-Environment Centers, in which observed extreme events of the recent past are simulated in different background climate states in order to better understand the influence of climate change on extremes.
Gregory Offer is Professor of Electrochemical Engineering at Imperial College London, is based in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and helps lead the interdepartmental Electrochemical Science and Engineering Group. His research focuses on both the experiments and modelling of batteries, supercapacitors, and fuel cells. Greg was a co-founder of the Faraday Institution in 2017, and is the PI of the Multi-Scale Modelling project, >£20M over 7 years including 9 institutions. Greg co-founded and organises the Future Propulsion Conference series in the UK, attracting over 600 delegates and exhibitors each year. Greg also co-founded and is Director of multiple spin-out companies, including Breathe Battery Technologies Ltd.
Michael Mercer is a laboratory lead in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Helmut-Schmidt-University, Hamburg, supporting the Chair for Computational Materials Design. After a degree in physics at the University of Warwick, UK, he did a PhD at the University of Bristol as part of the Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials. As a postdoc at Lancaster University, he joined the Faraday Institution-funded Multi-Scale Modelling project in 2018, and has since led advanced thermodynamic characterisation and atomistic/statistical thermodynamics modelling of battery materials, developing new insights into lithium- and sodium-ion intercalation. In his new role at Helmut-Schmidt, he is leading a new battery lab which will integrate high-throughput physical vapour deposition (PVD) and computation to screen candidate materials for next generation batteries with a focus on coupling these techniques with advanced electrochemical characterisation.
Michael Eikerling, theoretical physicist by training, is Professor at RWTH Aachen University and Director of the Institute of Energy and Climate Research in Forschungszentrum Jülich, heading the new sub-Institute for Theory and Computation of Energy Materials (IEK-13). Moreover, he is the Scientific Coordinator of the Centre for Advanced Simulation and Analytics (CASA) in Jülich. Previous important stages of his career were at Simon Fraser University and the National Research Council in Vancouver, Canada. Research in IEK-13 explores how electrochemical energy materials form, function, fade and fail, focusing on interface theory, electrocatalytic phenomena, nanopore transport, statistical physics of materials aging, porous electrode theory, and modeling and diagnostics of electrochemical devices. In 2017, he was awarded the Alexander Kuznetsov Prize for Theoretical Electrochemistry of the International Society of Electrochemistry, in recognition of his groundbreaking work on modeling polymer electrolyte fuel cells.
Antoni Forner-Cuenca leads the Electrochemical Materials and Systems Laboratory at Eindhoven University of Technology. The ultimate goal of his research is to accelerate the deployment of transformative energy technologies into the real world. To do so, his group employs fundamental principles at the convergence of (electro)chemical engineering, materials science, and physical chemistry to design, synthesize, characterize, and simulate materials and reactors. Areas of application include large-scale energy storage with flow batteries, energy conversion with hydrogen fuel cells, and decarbonization of the chemical industry with electrolysis. Before starting his independent career, Antoni was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. from ETH Zürich and the Paul Scherrer Institute. His work has been recognized by multiple awards including the ERC Starting Grant, NWO Veni, ETH Zurich Medal, the Electrochemical Society Graduate Student Award, and the Hydrogen Europe Young Scientist Award.
André Weber is working as senior scientist and academic counselor at the Institute for Applied Materials – Electrochemical Technologies (IAM-ET), an institute in the faculty of electrical engineering and information technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He is heading two research groups related to fuel cells and electrolyzers and batteries and is the scientific manager of the “Fuel Cell Test Laboratory”, a lab designated to fuel cell system testing. His research is related to electrical testing and modeling of fuel cells and batteries, with a special emphasis on electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. Experimental and theoretical work ranges from fundamental studies on model systems to the analysis of commercial products, aiming at an understanding of the complex coupling of electrochemical reactions and transport mechanisms with material-, microstructural- and design-parameters of these electrochemical devices.