Andrea Cipollina
Dr. Andrea Cipollina is a Full Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Università di Palermo (Palermo, Italy).
His research Interests focus on water desalination and renewable energy technologies, Salinity Gradient Power processes, and valorisation of brines of natural or anthropic origin. He has led R&D activities in several EU research project on the above topics, developing pioneering prototype systems for desalination and brine valorisation. In particular, he has coordinated the EU project SEArcularMINE, aiming at the “Circular processing of seawater brines from saltworks for recovery of valuable raw materials”. With more than 200 ISI publications and several books in the field of membrane technologies, desalination, salinity gradient power and brine mining, he has gained a relevant position within the academic community related to these topics.
He is also co-founder of the spin-off company ResourSEAs, scaling-up high-tech solutions for brine valorisation and for the circular economy of seawater.
Plenary talk: Engineering electrodes across length-scales for redox flow batteries and fuel cells.
Antoni Forner-Cuenca
Prof. Antoni Forner-Cuenca earned his Chemical Engineering degree from the University of Alicante (2013) and completed his PhD at the Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich, where he pioneered gas diffusion layers with patterned wettability for polymer electrolyte fuel cells. His doctoral work, completed in 2016, was recognized with the ETH Zurich Medal for outstanding thesis and the Electrochemical Society Energy Technology Graduate Student Award. From 2017 to 2018, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advancing the science and engineering of redox flow batteries for large-scale energy storage. In 2019, Prof. Forner-Cuenca started his independent career at Eindhoven University of Technology, where he founded and leads the Electrochemical Materials and Systems Group. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2023 and to Full Professor in late 2025.
His research has been distinguished with numerous honors, including the Princess of Girona Award, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Early Career Award, the Electrochemical Society Energy Technology Division Supramaniam Srinivasan Early Career Award, an ERC Starting Grant, Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) Veni and Vidi Grants, and the Hydrogen Europe Young Scientist Award. He was also voted Best Teacher of the TU/e master’s program for two consecutive years.
Prof. Forner-Cuenca’s research focuses on advancing transformative electrochemical technologies for real-world energy applications. By leveraging principles from (electro)chemical engineering, materials science, and physical chemistry, his team designs, synthesizes, characterizes, and models innovative materials and electrochemical reactors. Key applications include large-scale energy storage with flow batteries, energy conversion via hydrogen fuel cells and electrolyzers, and decarbonization of the chemical industry through efficient molecular synthesis and separation processes.
Link: https://www.fornercuencaresearch.com/
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Plenary talk: Advancing flow batteries for large-scale energy storage.
Ulrike Kramm
Dr. Ulrike Kramm is Full-Professor of Catalysts and Electrocatalysts at TU Darmstadt since 2020. Her research focuses on the development and characterization of sustainable electrocatalysts, particularly for fuel cell and electrolysis research. She did her PhD with distinction at the TU Berlin together with HZB Berlin. Ulrike Kramm is considered a leading expert in the identification of active sites in metal-nitrogen-modified carbon catalysts (MNC). She has established in situ and operando Mössbauer spectroscopy as a crucial tool for directly observing the dynamics of catalyst centers during chemical reactions.
Since 2022, she has been the spokesperson for the Collaborative Research Center 1487 "Iron, upgraded!”, a DFG funded project that chemically modifies iron to make it applicable for new technologies. Her research has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize (2020), and the Curious Mind Award in the Energy and Mobility category (2019).
Link: https://www.chemie.tu-darmstadt.de/ekat/index.en.jsp
Plenary talk: In situ and operando nuclear resonance techniques as powerful tool for characterizing iron-related electrochemisty .