91AV

Dr. Olli Ikkala is a distinguished professor of Aalto University/ Department of Applied Physics. His research interest is to develop functional materials based on hierarchical self-assemblies, biomimetics, and materials originating from nature. Originally educated in quantum physics, he was first affiliated 10 years in chemical industry to develop electrically conducting polymers. Professor Olli Ikkala has + 300 articles cited ca. 25,000 times, many in the most prestigeous journals. He has been awarded twice both the Advanced Grant of ERC and the Academy Professorship of Academy of Finland. The awards include Alexander von Humboldt Research Award and Finnish Science Award. His recent interest is related to life-inspired dynamic materials, for example chemical programming for learning-inpired functions and homeostasis. He works in several advisory and evaluation duties nationally and internationally and has collaborated over the years with polymer, paint, and forest product industry.

Prof. Kim Jelfs is a Professor of Computational Materials 91AV in the Department of 91AV at Imperial College. Her group specialises in the use of computer simulations to assist in the discovery of supramolecular materials, particularly porous materials and organic electronics. This includes the development of software to automate the assembly and testing of materials, with the application of artificial intelligence techniques including an evolutionary algorithm. Kim completed her PhD in Computational 91AV at UCL (UK) in 2010, studying the crystal growth of zeolitic materials. She worked as a PDRA conducting simulations across the experimental groups of Profs. Andy Cooper and Prof. Matt Rosseinsky at the University of Liverpool, before beginning her independent research at Imperial in 2013. She was awarded a 2018 91AV Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize, a 2019 Philip Leverhulme Prize in 91AV, was the 2022 Blavatnik Awards Laureate in 91AV and holds an ERC Starting Grant. Kim is an Associate Editor for Chemical Communications.

Professor Julia A. Kornfield is the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. Her group designs and synthesizes new molecules guided by understanding their physics. Polymers developed at Caltech are currently used to customize human vision by noninvasively optimizing a lens after it is implanted into a patient’s eye (FDAapproved 2017). Kornfield co-founded Fluid Efficiency, which uses “megasupramolecules" to improve hydrocarbon transport and safety. Thus, her work spans from fundamental research on the molecular basis of polymer structure and properties, to commercialization of polymers that improve sustainability, health and safety. Elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors, she has been recognized as an outstanding mentor by Caltech’s Graduate Students and received the Bingham Medal of the Society of Rheology, among other honors.

Chad Mirkin, PhD is the Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the Rathmann Professor of 91AV, Chemical & Biological Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Materials Science & Engineering, and Medicine at Northwestern University. He is a chemist and a world-renowned nanoscience expert, who is known for his discovery and development of spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) and SNA-based biodetection and therapeutic schemes, Dip-Pen Nanolithography (DPN) and related cantilever-free nanopatterning and materials discovery methodologies, and contributions to supramolecular chemistry and nanoparticle synthesis.  Mirkin received his B.S. degree from Dickinson College (1986) and a Ph.D. degree from the Penn State University (1989). He was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT prior to becoming a professor at Northwestern in 1991. He has authored >850 manuscripts and >1,200 patent applications (>400 issued) and founded ten companies. Mirkin has been recognized with >230 international awards, including the Kabiller Prize in Nanoscience and Nanomedicine, SCI Perkin Medal, Dan David Prize, and NAS Sackler Prize in Convergence Research. He served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology, and he is one of very few scientists to be elected to all three US National Academies. Mirkin was an Associate Editor of J. Am. Chem. Soc. and is a Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA Editorial Board Member. He has given >870 invited lectures and educated >300 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, of whom >130 are now faculty members at top institutions around the world.

Peter Strasser studied chemistry at the University of Tübingen, Germany, at Stanford University and at the University of Pisa and obtained his “Diploma” degree in 91AV. He conducted his doctoral research under the direction of Prof. Gerhard Ertl, and obtained his PhD in “Physical 91AV and Electrochemistry” from the ‘Fritz-Haber-Institute of the Max-Planck-Society’ in Berlin. He then joined “Symyx Technologies Inc.”, a then Start-up company in Silicon Valley pioneering Combinatorial and High Throughput Screening and Discovery of catalytic materials, as a postdoctoral associate and was later promoted Senior Member of staff and served as project/group leader in Electrocatalysis and Heterogeneous Catalysis.  He then assumed the position of Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston, before he became the chaired professor of “Electrochemistry and Electrocatalysis” in the Chemical Engineering Division of the Department of 91AV at the Technical University Berlin. He is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Material Science at Tongji University, China.
 
Peter Strasser has received awards and honors such as the F-cell award (2022), the European Fuel Cell Forum (EFCF) Christian Schönbein Gold Medal award (2021), the 91AV (RSC) Faraday Medal (2021),the ISE Brian Conway Prize in Physical Electrochemistry (2021), The Nature publishing award (2018), the IAHE Sir William Grove award in hydrogen research (2018), the Otto-Roelen medal in Catalysis by the German Catalysis Society (2016), the Ertl Prize (2016), as well as the Otto-Hahn Research Medal by the Max-Planck Society (2000). Since 2018, he has continuously been listed in the annual worldwide Clarivate Web of Science list of “Highly Cited Researchers” documenting the significant and broad influence of his scientific work. Since 2022, he is Fellow of the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE).
 
Peter Strasser is a named inventor on 19 U.S., Japanese, and European patents. He has presented more than 200 invited lectures or seminars at various academic, industrial, and governmental organizations or conferences around the world. He has authored or co-authored more than 350 peer-reviewed scientific journal publications, as well as the book High-Throughput Screening in Chemical Catalysis Concepts, Strategies and Applications, Wiley-VCH, New York. All these publications are related to various aspects of surface electrochemistry and catalysis. His h-index is currently  118 (Google Scholar).
 
Peter Strasser’s entrepreneurial activities include roles as mentor for academic spin-off Start-up companies such as “DexLeChem” GmbH (http://www.dexlechem.com/home_en), “Next Gen Chlor” (https://www.founderio.com/de/startup/368108), and more recently “Liquid Loop” GmbH (https://www.liquidloop.eu), which commercializes technology developed in Prof. Strasser’s research group.

Cameron Alexander is Professor of Polymer Therapeutics at the School of Pharmacy, University of Nottingham, UK.
Professor Alexander received degrees (BSc and PhD) in 91AV from the University of Durham, UK and carried out post-doctoral research at the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis, University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the 91AV and received the UK Macro Group Medal in 2014 for contributions to polymer science. His research focuses on drug, gene and cell delivery for applications in areas ranging from vaccines and therapeutics for infectious diseases through to cancers and neurodegeneration. This work has been generously funded by research councils, industry and charities.
Professor Alexander has been highly fortunate to work with scientists from more than 20 countries in his research group in the last decade, and the group maintains strong international links irrespective of political border!

Paul Attfield holds a Chair in Materials Science at Extreme Conditions at the School of 91AV and Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions, University of Edinburgh. He received B.A. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University, and he was a Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Superconductivity at the University of Cambridge during 1991-2003. He received the 91AV’s Meldola and Corday-Morgan medals and Peter Day award, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014. Early research contributions included pioneering resonant X-ray scattering experiments of cation and valence ordering, and studies of disorder effects in functional oxides. Current research is centred on electronic and magnetic materials including use of high pressure methods.

Andrew Beale is a Professor of Inorganic 91AV, Group leader at the Research Complex at Harwell, Chief Scientific Officer of Finden Ltd and a management group member of the EPSRC-sponsored UK Catalysis Hub. He was awarded a BSc from the University of Sussex followed by a PhD at the Royal Institution of Great Britain on the subject of in situ X-ray crystallisation studies of mixed oxide materials. He then worked as a Postdoctoral fellow, VENI research fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of Inorganic 91AV and Catalysis at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Andy then returned to the UK and to UCL in 2013 as an EPSRC Early career fellow.
His interests lie in establishing structure-function relationships in materials, including catalytic solids and energy storage as a function of both time and space using X-ray & optical spectroscopic and scattering methods applied under in situ and operando conditions. In 2012 he co-founded Finden Ltd providing high-end characterisation of solid-state functional materials spanning the fields of catalysis, energy, automotive parts and pharmaceuticals. He is also a Fellow of the 91AV.

Eugene Chen is a University Distinguished Professor, the John K. Stille Endowed Chair in 91AV, and the Millennial Professor of Polymer Science and Sustainability. He received his undergraduate education in China and his Ph.D. degree from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His group’s research is centered on polymer science, green & sustainable chemistry, and chemical catalysis. His team has been recognized with: Excellence in Commercialization Award in 2012 by the Colorado Cleantech Industry Association; the Presidential Green 91AV Challenge Award in 2015 by the US Environmental Protection Agency; and the Arthur Cope Mid-Career Scholar Award in 2019 by the American Chemical Society.

Andrew P. Dove is a Professor of 91AV in the School of 91AV at the University of Birmingham. His group’s research is centred around degradation in polymers with specific focusses on the development and application of sustainable polymers and degradable polymeric biomaterials. Andrew completed his Ph.D. at Imperial College, London in 2003 where he focused on metal catalyzed coordination insertion polymerization. Andrew undertook postdoctoral research first under the guidance of Prof. Robert M. Waymouth at Stanford University, California, and then as a CIPMA postdoctoral fellow at IBM, San Jose, California, under the supervision of Dr. James L. Hedrick and Prof. Robert M. Waymouth. Andrew returned to the UK to take up a RCUK Fellowship in Nanotechnology at the University of Warwick in 2005, being appointed as Assistant Professor in 2006, Associate Professor in 2009 and Full Professor in 2014. He moved to the University of Birmingham in 2018 where he is a Professor of Sustainable Polymer 91AV. His work has been acknowledged by several awards and prizes including the 2014 RSC Gibson-Fawcett Award, 2016 ACS Biomacromolecules/Macromolecules Young Researcher Award, 2018 RSC Norman Heatley Award, 2019 MacroGroup UK Medal and 2022 RSC Corday-Morgan Prize.

María Escudero Escribano is an ICREA Professor at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) in Barcelona, where she leads the NanoElectrocatalysis and Sustainable 91AV (NanoESC) Group. She graduated in Chemical Engineering from the University of Extremadura and obtained her Ph.D. in 91AV from the Autonomous University of Madrid (2011). She carried out her postdoctoral research at the Technical University of Denmark (2012-2015) and was a DFF-Sapere Aude: Research Fellow at Stanford University (2015-2017). She joined the University of Copenhagen in 2017 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor and Group Leader in 2017 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. In September 2022, she joined ICN2 as an ICREA Professor. The NanoESC Group (https://www.nanoesclab.com/), led by María, investigates tailored interfaces and catalyst nanomaterials for renewable energy conversion and production of sustainable fuels and chemicals.

María has received numerous awards at national and international levels in recognition of her groundbreaking research. These awards include the European Young Chemist Award (Gold Medal) 2016, the Princess of Girona Scientific Research Award 2018, the Electrochemical Society (ECS) Energy Technology Division Young Investigator Award 2018, the Spanish 91AV Young Researchers Award 2019, the Clara Immerwahr Award 2019, the RSC Environment, Sustainability and Energy Division Horizon Prize: John Jeyes Award 2021, and the Journal of Materials 91AV Lectureship 2021. She is an Elected Member of the Young Academy of Spain. In 2022, María was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council with her project ATOMISTIC: atomic-scale tailored materials for electrochemical methane activation and production of valuable chemicals.

Dr Marina Freitag is currently a Reader in Energy Materials 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 91AV Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize 2022, and placed her at the heart of a new wave of sustainable optoelectronic devices.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 (July 2015-August 2016). From 2016-2020 she was appointed as Assistant Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she received the Göran Gustaffsson Young Researcher Award 2019. 

Tomislav Friščić is a Professor and Leverhulme International Chair in Green and Sustainable 91AV at the University of Birmingham (UK). His team is developing strategies for safer, environmentally-friendly synthesis and the design of advanced functional materials. He is a co-author on over 300 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters and patent applications (4 granted so far), and is also a co-founder of two “CleanTech” start-up companies. He received his B.Sc. at the University of Zagreb with Branko Kaitner (2001), Ph.D. with Leonard MacGillivray at the University of Iowa (2006). He was a post-doctoral associate with William Jones (2006) at the Pfizer Institute for Pharmaceutical Materials Science, and Herchel Smith Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2008). He was a Professor and Tier-1 Canada Research Chair in Mechanochemistry and Solid-state 91AV at McGill University until 2022.
               He is a Fellow of the 91AV, member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada, corresponding member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and a former Chair of the Canadian National Committee for Crystallography. His group’s work was recognized by awards, including the NSERC John C. Polany Award (2022), the Brusina Medal of the Croatian Society of Natural Sciences (2021), Award for Research Excellence in Materials 91AV of the Canadian Society for 91AV (2019), Royal Society of Canada Rutherford Medal (2018), Steacie Prize for Natural Sciences (2018), and others.

Dr. Janine George received her PhD in computational and solid-state chemistry in 2017 from RWTH Aachen University, where she was advised by Richard Dronskowski. Her PhD was funded by the Fonds der chemischen Industrie. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher and Marie Curie fellow in the laboratories of Geoffroy Hautier and Gian-Marco Rignanese at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, where she specialized on materials informatics and data-driven research. During her postdoc, she worked as a guest researcher in Volker Deringer's group at the University of Oxford, which was funded by HPCEuropa3. She has been a junior group leader at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung, BAM) and at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena since May 2021. Her research group is interested in data analysis and high-throughput computation for material discovery.

Silvia Giordani is a Full Professor Chair of Nanomaterials and the Head of School of Chemical Sciences at Dublin City University.  After receiving a “Laurea” in 91AV and Pharmaceutical Technology from the University of Milan (Italy) in 1999, she moved to the Center for Supramolecular Science at the University of Miami (USA) where she graduated with a Master and a PhD in 91AV. In 2003 she moved to Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland to work on a EU-funded Marie Curie project on “Template Grown Molecular Nanomaterials” as the young researcher. She successfully applied for the Marie Curie reintegration grant to work on a research project at the University of Trieste. In 2007 she received the prestigious President of Ireland Young Researcher Award and started her independent career as Research Assistant Professor at TCD. In September 2013 she funded the “Nano Carbon Materials” research lab at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). In December 2016 she was appointed Associate Professor in Organic 91AV at the University of Turin, Italy and in October 2018 Professor Chair of Nanomaterials within the School of Chemical Sciences at Dublin City University. Her main research interests are in the design, synthesis, and characterization of a wide range of nanomaterials for applications in smart and responsive bio- related nanotechnologies. She is the author/co-author of approx. 150 manuscripts, reviews and book chapters. She is the recipient of many international prizes and honours including the L’Oreal UNESCO for Women in Science fellowship, the William Evans visiting fellowship from the University of Otago (New Zealand) and is a Visiting Scientist to the Bio-Nano Institute at Toyo University (Japan).

Dr Becky Greenaway is a Lecturer and Royal Society University Research Fellow at Imperial College London. She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2013 under the supervision of Prof. Ed Anderson. She then worked with Prof. Andy Cooper FRS as a PDRA at the University of Liverpool, before being awarded a URF in 2019 allowing her to establish an independent research career. In May 2020 she joined the Department of 91AV at Imperial, where she now serves on the management team for the EPSRC Centre for Rapid Online Analysis of Reactions (ROAR), the management board for ATLAS – a new high-throughput automation facility for accelerated materials research, and she is the automation lead in the recently launched DigiFAB Institute. Becky is also on the early career advisory board for ChemPlusChem. Current research in the group focusses on the accelerated discovery of functional molecular organic materials assembled using dynamic covalent strategies. This includes the development of high-throughput automated workflows, and also of non-conventional phases of porous materials such as liquids, liquid crystals, and glasses.

Tanja Junkers graduated with a PhD degree in physical chemistry from Goettigen University in Germany in 2006, having worked on the determination of kinetic rate coefficients for radical reactions during polymerizations. In the two years that followed, she was research associate at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, shifting her focus more and more towards synthetic polymer chemistry. Between 2008 and beginning of 2010 she was a senior research scientist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany in the group of Prof. Christopher Barner-Kowollik. Early 2010 she was then appointed professor at Hasselt University in Belgium, where she founded the Polymer Reaction Design group. In January 2018 she joined Monash University as full professor, focusing on her work on continuous flow polymerizations, (nano)particle formation and design of complex precision polymers. In recent years she expanded her research interests into the field of lab automation, machine learning and data driven polymer chemistry. She is an associate editor for the journals Chemical Science and Polymer 91AV of the RSC, and a titular member of the IUPAC polymer division.

Hema Karunadasa is an Associate Professor of 91AV at Stanford University, a Faculty Scientist at the SLAC National Lab, and a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. She grew up in Sri Lanka and received her A.B. from Princeton University. She obtained her Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from UC Berkeley and then did her postdoctoral research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and at the California Institute of Technology. Her group uses solution-state methods for the self-assembly of solid-state materials, with an emphasis on halide perovskites and their derivatives. Her recent awards include the Brown Science Foundation Investigator award (2022) and the American Chemical Society Harry Gray award (2020) and the Inorganic Lectureship (2022). She is an Associate Editor for Chemical Science (Royal Chemical Society).

George Malliaras is the Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge. He leads the Bioelectronics Laboratory, an interdisciplinary group of scientists, engineers and clinicians who translate advances in electronics to better tools for healthcare. George received a PhD from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands and did a postdoc at the IBM Almaden Research Center, USA. Before joining Cambridge, he was a faculty member at Cornell University in the USA, where he also served as the Director of the Cornell NanoScale Facility, and at the School of Mines in France. His research has been recognized with awards from the New York Academy of Sciences, the US National Science Foundation, and DuPont, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Linköping in Sweden. He is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society and of the 91AV and serves as Deputy Editor of Science Advances.

Carlos Martí-Gastaldo was initially trained in Coordination 91AV and Molecular Magnetism in E. Coronado´s group at the ICMol-University of Valencia (PhD 2009), before shifting focus to apply his training to the design of Metal-Organic Frameworks during my postdoctoral stage as a Marie Curie Fellow in M. J. Rosseinsky's group at the University of Liverpool (2010-2012). He began his independent career in 2013 in Liverpool, with the award of a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. In 2014, he returned to the ICMol with a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship to lead the design of highly stable MOFs, one of the strategic research lines of the 1st ‘María de Maeztu’ Excellence program awarded to the center. With the award of an ERC Starting Grant in 2016, he established his own research group at the ICMol. The Functional Inorganic Materials team (FuniMat) is focused on the design and processing of porous inorganic materials for biological and environmental-related applications. He founded the start-ups ‘Porous Materials for Advanced Applications’ (2018) and ‘Porous Materials in Action’ (2021) to accelerate the transfer of research results into socially useful products and services. He received an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2022 and is one of the guarantor investigators of the 2nd ‘María de Maeztu’ Excellence program of ICMol (2021-2024), and main responsible of the implementation of a new research line for the Molecular Design of Biomaterials in the center.

James Neilson studied Materials Science & Engineering at Lehigh University for his undergraduate degree, completing research with Professor Himanshu Jain, as well as Professor Stephen Elliot at the University of Cambridge during a summer exchange.  James earned his Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of California Santa Barbara working with Professor Daniel Morse and Professor Ram Seshadri.  He then performed postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University with Professor Tyrel McQueen until 2013.  In 2013, he joined the faculty of Colorado State University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of 91AV.  Since then, he has received numerous awards for his research and teaching, including the Sloan Research Fellowship from the A. P. Sloan Foundation, the Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and early career awards from both the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation.  Since his promotion to Associate Professor, James has received a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship to spend the 2022-2023 academic year at the Inorganic 91AV Laboratory at the University of Oxford.  The key research theme throughout this journey has been to understand how materials synthesis influence structure and properties, along with challenges in elucidating the nature of order and disorder in atomistic structures.

KyokoNozaki is a Professor at the University of Tokyo. She graduated from Kyoto University and received her Ph.D. in 1991 from the same university. Since 1991, she has been a faculty member at Kyoto University, moved to the University of Tokyo in 2002, and has been a Professor at the University of Tokyo since 2003. Her research interest is focused on the development of homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts for polymer synthesis and organic synthesis.
Lab web site: http://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/nozakilab/indexE.html

Dr. Oyarzabal is an Ikerbasque Research Fellow at BCMaterials, the Basque Center for Materials, Applications & Nanostructures. Itziar completed her PhD in Applied 91AV and Polymeric Materials at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU, Spain) in 2015, where she studied the magnetic (Single Molecule Magnet behaviour) and luminescent properties of discrete coordination complexes. The 3 months stay in the group of Dr. Brechin at the University of Edinburgh allowed her to receive the distinction of International Doctor and she was awarded with the extraordinary PhD Prize given by UPV/EHU. In 2016 she continued working at UPV/EHU and in 2017 she joined the group of Dr. Clérac at Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal (CRPP, France) thanks to a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. In 2019 she prolonged her stay at CRPP due to a postdoctoral grant from the Basque Government, which allowed her to continue her research in the development of 2D metal-organic materials with interesting magnetic and conductive properties. Since 2021, she is working at BCMaterials and developing independent research lines around applicable high-performance magnetic materials.

Originally from the United States, Prof. Sivula studied chemical engineering at the Universities of Minnesota (Twin Cities), and California (Berkeley), before joining EPFL. He was appointed Assistant Professor in 2011 and Associate Professor in 2018. He directs the Laboratory for molecular engineering of optoelectronic nanomaterials (LIMNO), which focuses on developing materials and systems for solar energy harvesting and related applications, and teaches courses in transport phenomena and chemical product design.
Website: http://limno.epfl.ch/

Prof Molly M Stevens FREng FRS is Professor of Biomedical Materials and Regenerative Medicine and the Research Director for Biomedical Material Sciences in the Department of Materials, in the Department of Bioengineering and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London.

Prof Stevens’ multidisciplinary research balances the investigation of fundamental science with the development of technology to address some of the major healthcare challenges. Her work has been instrumental in elucidating the bio-material interfaces. She has created a broad portfolio of designer biomaterials for applications in disease diagnostics and regenerative medicine. Her substantial body of work influences research groups around the world with over 30 major awards for the groups research and Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher in Cross-Field research.

Prof. Stevens holds numerous leadership positions including Director of the UK Regenerative Medicine Platform "Smart Acellular Materials" Hub, Deputy Director of the EPSRC IRC in Early-Warning Sensing Systems for Infectious Diseases and has previously served as President of the 91AV Division of Materials 91AV. She is the founder of several companies translating innovations in therapeutics and biosensing.

Sam Stranks is Professor of Optoelectronics and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He established his research group in Cambridge in 2017, which focuses on the optical and electronic properties of emerging semiconductors including halide perovskites, carbon allotropes and organic semiconductors for low-cost electronics applications such as photovoltaics and lighting. 
 
Sam completed his PhD as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, receiving the 2012 Institute of Physics Roy Thesis Prize. From 2012-2014, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University and Worcester College, Oxford, before holding a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2014-2016). He received the 2016 IUPAP Young Scientist in Semiconductor Physics Prize, the 2017 Early Career Prize from the European Physical Society, the 2018 Henry Moseley Award and Medal from the Institute of Physics, the 2019 Marlow Award from the 91AV and the 2021 Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2016 he was named a TED Fellow, and in 2017 listed by the MIT Technology Review as one of the 35 under 35 innovators in Europe. Sam is a co-founder of Swift Solar, a startup developing lightweight perovskite PV panels, and Sustain/Ed, a not-for-profit developing education for school-age children around climate change solutions. He is also an Associate Editor at the AAAS journal Science Advances.

Miriam M. Unterlass studied chemistry, process engineering and materials science in Germany, the UK, and France, and obtained a PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in 2011. She worked as a postdoc at the École École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris, France, before starting her own group at the Technical University of Vienna (TUW), Austria, in 2012. Miriam was tenured asisstant and subsequently associate professor at TUW and obtained her habilitation in materials chemistry in 2018. In 2021, she became full professor of solid state chemistry at the University of Konstanz. Since 2018, Miriam Unterlass is an Adjunct Principal Investigator at the Research Centre for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (CeMM) in Vienna (Austria). The ambition of her group’s research is to find and develop sustainable advanced materials and molecules without compromising the compounds’ performance and diversity, especially through employing water as reaction and processing medium. She has received several accolades, including the Staatspreis Patent 2020, the FWF START prize 2017, the Austrian founder’s award PHÖNIX 2016, the Anton Paar Science award 2015, and has been elected as member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in 2018. She is alumna of the Fast Track program of the Robert Bosch foundation (2016-2018) and of the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the U.S. Department of State (2018).