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SAFECONOMY
Early Career Researcher Training
Nicholas Duggan
ZUAS
Nicholas is an innovation and marketing professional with extensive experience across the technology commercialisation and start-up sectors. He is a Founder at Zuas, a leading innovation and enterprise agency, where he leads a team that works with more than 25 universities and research institutes. Nicholas is also a founder and former CEO of a successful biotech start-up. As CEO, he led the company through successful technology development, IP protection, building out the team, raising seed funding and two subsequent equity raising rounds, to the winning of first customers.
Nicholas has also worked to build innovation capability and performance across the humanitarian sector, with UNICEF and the Humanitarian Innovation Fund. He has a business studies degree and a master’s degree in business strategy, both from University College Dublin.
Stephen Fairless
Sustainable Energy Engineering
Sustainable Energy Engineering is a family run company, set up in the summer of 2006 by husband and wife team, Stephen and Haley Fairless. The renewable industry was still in its infancy back then and was a difficult field to join. However, with hard work and determination, the company has grown its client base and is now well established in the region, and is now based at Glover Business Park, Washington.
Stephen has gained a wealth of experience as a result of his long service within the electrical and renewable industries. The company’s engineers are trade qualified and follow the JTL Apprenticeship scheme, which is the industry’s leading, national apprenticeship scheme.
Over the years our customers' have come to recognise Sustainable Energy Engineering as a reputable and trusted installer. We still hold the same values, of believing in and building a Sustainable environment for future generations. Our choice is to try and deliver this with good quality, value for money systems, at a fair price.
Prof. Martin Heeney
KAUST, KSA
Professor Heeney’s research interests are focused upon the design, synthesis and characterization of solution processed materials and polymers for a range of applications in electronics, energy generation and storage and sensors. His research is highly multi-disciplinary and collaborative covering aspects of organic, polymer and materials chemistry with a central goal of establishing relationships between molecular design, synthetic methodology, processing, and performance.
Dr. Shangfeng Du
University of Birmingham, UK
Shangfeng Du, Associate Professor in the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, leads Birmingham Electrochemical Engineering Group. He studied Materials Science and Engineering at Tsinghua University, and received PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Powder Metallurgy Laboratory (PML) at Max Planck Institute for Metals Research before he joined Birmingham. His group is focused on electrochemical engineering research of components, devices and evaluation for clean and sustainable energy applications. The research activities cover electrode design, composite membrane and porous transport layer fabrication, and fundamental research on the surface and interface characterization for low temperature fuel cells and electrolysers. He is Editorial Board Member of Scientific Reports and Automotive Innovation. He has been author of 1 book, and published more than 60 journal papers, book chapters, and patents.
Dr Muhammad Imran
Aston University, UK
Dr Imran is a Senior Lecturer of Mechanical, Biomedical & Design Engineering in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Aston University. He is an established researcher and working in energy efficiency and sustainability since 2012. His research activities aimed at developing innovative energy systems and improving the energy performance of existing energy systems.
Prof. Sara Walker
Newcastle University, UK
Prof. Walker spent eight years at De Montfort University, where her research and teaching focussed on renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies, and where she also completed a PhD part time. This PhD investigated the impact of electricity sector deregulation on renewable energy market share. During that period with De Montfort University, Prof. Walker worked on a number of research projects around renewable energy and energy efficiency, primarily funded by the European Commission.
Prof. Walker then moved out of academia and into industry, with a five year period in energy related consultancies. This consultancy work for Econnect and IT Power included contribution to the influential report “Potential for micro-generation: study and analysis” published by Energy Saving Trust for the DTI. Prof. Walker also worked on high profile projects for commercial clients, such as London Array.
Dr. Adib Allahham
Newcastle University, UK
Dr Adib Allahham is a Co-Investigator on HI-ACT for WP1-The Way Forward, WP2- Whole Systems Understanding and WP4-Social and Political Intervention. He is a Senior Research Associate at the School of Engineering. His research involves projects around the smart grid, electricity distribution, the power sector and multi-vector energy systems. These projects address the need to cost-effectively decarbonise the energy sector over the next thirty years by facilitating innovative network integration of new generation, and the integration of different energy vectors including Hydrogen. Computer simulation, laboratory investigation and demonstration projects are used together to produce new knowledge that delivers this requirement.
Prof. Sheng Dai
University of Leeds, UK
Sheng Dai received his Bachelor degree from Zhejiang University, and Masters and PhD degrees from Nanyang Technological University. He worked as a postdoc fellow at McMaster University, University of Alberta and University of Toronto under the support of NSERC Canada and NIH USA. After that, he moved the University of Adelaide as a Senior Lecturer and an Associate Professor. He moved to Newcastle University as a Professor of Chemical Engineering and the Deputy Head of School of Engineering in 2017. Later, he took the Founding Head of Department post to establish a new chemical engineering department at Brunel University London. From 2022, he joined the University of Leeds as the Head of School of Chemical and Process Engineering. Sheng’s research expertise is to develop diverse applications of advanced functional polymers, nanomaterials and interface in healthcare, water engineering and clean energy.
Prof. Jawwad Darr
University College London, UK
Professor Jawwad Darr (University College London) is one of the UK’s leading academics in advanced functional materials processing. He is visiting professor at Comsats University Islamabad (Lahore Campus). In 2017, he co-founded the UPSIGN charity (UK-Pakistan Science and Innovation Global Network; www.upsign.org.uk) to support, educate and connect Pakistani origin academics and students. He speaks on a wide range of science topics including green chemistry and applications of (nano)materials, and he is involved in mentoring and training Pakistani origin students from underprivileged backgrounds.
Prof. John Zhanhu Guo
Northumbria University, UK
Dr. Guo is the director of the Integrated Composites Laboratory (ICL). Our ICL focuses on advanced materials preparation, characterization and their applications. The researchers have developed unique methods to prepare polymer nanocomposites reinforced with different kinds of nanoparticles encompassing ceramics, nanocarbon and magnetic metals. Except using the commercially available nanoparticles, the team has also creatively synthesized hollow, core-shell and chain like nanostructures for preparing nanocomposites, developed an in-situ composite fabrication method through wet chemical reduction method in the polymer solution, electropolized conducive monomers for the nanocoating formation as well. In addition, different shells surrounding the magnetic core have also been discovered with a possibly significant effect on the biomedical and energy areas.
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Prof. Tapas Mallick
University of Exeter, UK
I am Professor and Chair in Clean Technologies, Renewable Energy and Lead of Solar Energy Research Group within the Environment & Sustainability Institute. I am also Director and Scientific Advisor of the BuildSolar Limited. I am also Visiting Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. My research focus is applied solar energy and, with my research team, I look at bridging the urban and rural energy divide through solar energy implementation. I am particularly interested in teaching advanced solar energy engineering and heat transfer for renewable energy systems. I am actively involved various RCUK, European and Industrial funded research projects in the area of Solar Energy. I am part of SUPERGEN solar consortium, EUED centre - key research consortium in the UK. In addition, I am Associate Editor and Subject Editor of the Journals Energies and IET Renewable Power Generation. I have strong relationship with many ODA countries spans accross Indian continent, Middle East, and sub-saharan African continent. I have supervised twenty-two PhDs to completion and engaged several governmental level panel accross the world. In 2016 I received British Indian Award for services to Education in the UK and in 2018 BuildSolar received Best Innovation for Sustainability award in Cornwall.
Prof. Rami Ghannam
University of Glasgow, UK
I am currently a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Engineering Systems Design and an IEEE Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer. I held previous industrial positions at Nortel Networks and IBM Research GmbH. I was a research scientist at EPFL's PV Lab, where I worked on the device modelling of thin film solar cells. I am currently a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Senior Fellow of RET and a Member of the IET. I am also the Regional Chair of IEEE's Education Society in Scotland and the Chair of the IET Pedagogy in Engineering and Technology TN.
Prof. Christos Markides
Imperial College London, UK
Christos Markides was born in Athens (Greece) in 1978, and grew up first in Johannesburg (South Africa) until the age of 7 and then in Limassol (Cyprus). After finishing school in 1995 and attending compulsory military service from 1995 to 1997, he left Cyprus to undertake a 4-year MEng degree in Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Following this first degree, he did a PhD in Energy Technologies, also at the Department of Engineering of the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Epaminondas (Nondas) Mastorakos, which he completed in 2005. He now leads the Clean Energy Processes (CEP) Laboratory, coordinates the Experimental Multiphase Flow (EMF) Laboratory, which is the largest such experimental space at Imperial College London, and is a Co-Founder and Director of recent spin-out company Solar Flow.
Dr. Daniel Mulvihill
University of Glasgow, UK
Daniel M. Mulvihill is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Glasgow James Watt School of Engineering. He completed a D.Phil. in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford in 2012 and subsequently undertook postdoctoral periods at the University of Limerick, EPFL Switzerland and the University of Cambridge prior to joining Glasgow in 2016. His interests are mainly focused on materials engineering, tribology and materials for energy applications. Dr Mulvihill is a former Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) Tribology Trust Bronze Medalist (2013). He presently leads a major £1.5M EPSRC project (EP/V003380/1) on next generation textile triboelectric nanogenerators. Dr Mulvihill is a Novel Materials Editor for Chemical Engineering Journal (Elsevier) and Associate Editor for Results in Engineering (Elsevier).
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