Invited Speakers - Summer School
A number of speakers have now kindly accepted invitations to speak at the MH2014 summer school.
The provisional programme will be updated soon to more closely reflect the likely final version.
Professor Andreas Züttel
EMPA, Switzerland
"Introduction to Hydrogen in Materials: Fundamentals and Applications"
"Hydrogen in Metals and Metal Hydrides"
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Andreas Züttel is currently Head of the section “Hydrogen & Energy” at EMPA, Switzerland, and a professor in the Physics department at the University of Fribourg, where he received his PhD in 1993. In 1994, he was a postdoctoral researcher at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA. He then returned to the University of Fribourg to join the Physics Department as a lecturer. Professor Züttel has also been an external professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands, a guest professor at IMR, Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and a visiting professor at Delft Technical University, The Netherlands. He is also President of the Swiss Hydrogen Association “HYDROPOLE“. |
Dr Paul Anderson
University of Birmingham, UK
"Complex Hydrides: A Chemical Perspective"
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Paul Anderson is Reader in Inorganic and Materials Chemistry, and leader of the Materials Chemistry and Energy Research Theme, in the School of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Understanding the chemistry of solid state hydrogen storage has been a major theme of his research since 1999. He established and leads the Hydrogen Storage Chemistry Group in the School of Chemistry, which has an extensive ongoing programme dedicated to the discovery, synthesis and primary characterization of new hydrogen storage materials, and to the chemical modification of existing materials to improve their performance. He is currently a member of the science board of the EPSRC H2FC Supergen Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Hub and the management boards of the EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Hydrogen, Fuel Cells and their Applications and the Midlands Energy Graduate School (MEGS). |
Dr Theodore Steriotis
NCSR "Demokritos", Greece
"Hydrogen in Porous Solids and Inclusion Compounds"
Dr Nuno Bimbo
University of Bath, UK
"Quantifying Hydrogen Uptake by Porous Materials"
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Nuno Bimbo is currently a Postdoctoral Research Officer working in the Chemical Engineering Department of the University of Bath, on the SUPERGEN project “Integrated Safety Strategies for Onboard Hydrogen Storage Systems”. He finished an MSc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and graduated from a PhD in the University of Bath in 2013 on Modelling of Hydrogen Storage in Nanoporous Materials. The work was sponsored by the EPSRC as part of the United Kingdom Sustainable Hydrogen Energy Consortium (UK-SHEC) and was completed under Dr Tim Mays supervision. His research interests include the use of analytical models to analyse hydrogen storage in novel nanoporous materials and the thermodynamics and operating conditions for adsorptive storage. More recently, he has been researching the kinetics of hydrogen adsorption and the safety requirements for hydrogen storage systems. He has also been applying some of the tools and methods developed for hydrogen to other supercritical gases, such as methane. |
Dr Martin Owen Jones
ISIS, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK
"Characterising the Interaction of Hydrogen with Catalytic and Nanoscale Materials"
| Dr Martin Owen Jones received a BSc in Chemistry from Nottingham University in 1989 and PhD in Inorganic Chemistry from the same institution in 1993 for research into complex ternary oxides. Between 1993 and 2011 he worked as a research fellow at the University of Birmingham (1993-2003), CRISMAT (1993-1994) and Oxford University (2003-2011). In 2011 he was appointed as Energy Materials Coordinator at the ISIS neutron spallation facility, a unique position comprising undertaking his own research and developing the capabilities of the ISIS facility for energy materials. His recent studies have focused on the development and characterisation of materials for energy storage, with particular reference to ammonia and hydrogen stores. In addition to his duties at ISIS he is a Stipendiary Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry at Lincoln College, Oxford and is a member of the scientific board of the H2FC EPSRC Supergen hub. He has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers and has 7 patents relating to energy and energy storage. |
Dr Sabrina Sartori
University of Oslo, UNIK and Institute for Energy Technology, Norway
"Introduction to Spectroscopic Studies of Hydrogen in Materials"
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Sabrina Sartori is originally from Italy, where she earned her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering in 2003. She is associate professor at the University of Oslo since 2013 and researcher at UNIK and Institute for Energy Technology, Norway. Currently, she is also a Feinberg Foundation Visiting Faculty Program fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Her research interests include the synthesis and characterization of materials for hydrogen storage and batteries. Particular focus is on nano-scale and porous materials investigated with small-angle neutron and X-ray scattering, in-situ synchrotron radiation and powder neutron diffraction. Since 2013 she has served as a board member of MRS Bulletin, Energy Quarterly. |
Professor Yaroslav Filinchuk
UCL, Belgium
"Structural Characterisation of Metal Hydrides"
| Yaroslav Filinchuk graduated in chemistry from Lviv National University, Ukraine, in 2000 and received a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry from the same institution in 2002. Since 2002 he was a postdoc at the Laboratory of Crystallography at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. In 2006, he started as a postdoc and later as a beamline scientist on the Swiss-Norwegian Beam Lines at the European Synchrotron, ESRF, France. His work on hydrides was rewarded in 2010 by the ESRF young scientist award. Since 2011, he has been a professor of structural chemistry at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. His research group now includes 3 PhD students, 2 postdocs and 1 engineer. The group's main expertise is in structural studies that inspire design of new materials. He is the co-author of about 180 articles, cited more than 4000 times, with a h-index of 34. |
Dr Timmy Ramirez-Cuesta
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
"Structural and Dynamic Studies of Hydrogen in Porous Solids"
"Comparing Theory with Experiment: Some Spectroscopic Case Studies"
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A. J. (Timmy) Ramirez-Cuesta is the Chemical Spectroscopy Group Leader in the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), part of the Neutron Sciences Directorate, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US. The Chemical Spectroscopy Group boasts the world highest resolution QENS (BASIS) and the world’s only high-throughput/high-resolution INS spectrometer (VISION). Previously, he was Senior Instrument Scientist of the TOSCA spectrometer at the ISIS Facility in the United Kingdom. He is the author of aClimax, the de facto standard for calculation of INS spectra from ab-initio calculations. He has been working on computational modelling of experimental data for over 25 years and has been involved in the use of neutrons for over a decade. His scientific interests include lattice dynamics calculations, characterisation of hydrogen storage systems, metal hydrides and porous materials using inelastic neutron scattering and ab-initio computational methods, interactions of molecules with surfaces, and the modelling of surface reactions and catalysis using classical and quantum methods. |
Dr Andreas Borgschulte
EMPA, Switzerland
"Raman and Infrared Spectroscopy Studies of Metal Hydrides"
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Professor Mark S. Conradi
Washington University, USA
"Studying Hydrogen in Solids using NMR"
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Mark S. Conradi received his BS and PhD degrees in Physics at Washington University under Professor R. E. Norberg, in 1973 and 1977. A postdoctoral period at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1977-1979) introduced him to chemistry and ESR. He became an assistant (and later associate) professor at the College of William and Mary, where he focused on NMR of simple molecular solids, such as CO. In 1986, he moved back to Washington University. There, his interests ranged from amorphous silicon and reorientations and diffusion in molecular solids to lung imaging with laser-polarized helium-3 gas. He has used NMR to study metal hydrides since 1990, including metallic storage systems and (more recently) ionic and complex hydrides. A particular specialty has been the study of hydrides under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure. |