Professor Ken Baldwin is the inaugural Director of the Australian National University’s (ANU) Energy Change Institute, now part of the ANU Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions. 

He is also the founding Director of the ANU Grand Challenge: Zero-Carbon Energy for the Asia-Pacific. 

The main focus of his work is to help drive the energy transition, particularly for Australia’s future export industries based on renewable energy.

Prof Baldwin has held the following appointments:

• Project Steering Committee, Australian Energy Technology Assessment (2011-2013)
• Board member, South East Region of Renewable Energy Excellence (SERREE, 2014-2019)
• Socio-Economic Modelling Advisory Committee, South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission (2015-2017)
• Chair, Energy Cluster, the Australia-Indonesia Centre (2015-2018)
• Founding Chair, Energy Research Institutes Council for Australia (ERICA, 2018-2019)
• Steering Committee, CSIRO Hydrogen Research, Development and Demonstration Report (2019)
• Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) Steering Committee, Australian Energy Transition Research Plan (2019-2020).

 Professor Baldwin is an inaugural ANU Public Policy Fellow, and winner of the 2004 Australian Government Eureka Prize for Promoting Understanding of Science, for his role in initiating and championing “Science meets Parliament”. In 2007, he was awarded the W.H. Beattie Steele Medal, the highest honour of the Australian Optical Society.  In 2010 he was awarded the Barry Inglis Medal by the National Measurement Institute for excellence in precision measurement.

Professor Baldwin is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE), the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics (UK), the Optical Society of America and the Australian Institute of Physics.  He is also a Graduate Member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

Bio to come!

Bruce Hansen is Evoenergy’s Group Manager for Gas Networks and he is responsible for the management, operation and planning associated with Evoenergy’s gas networks in the ACT and surrounding NSW regions serving 160,000+ gas consumers.

With over 40 years’ experience in a diverse range of roles within the energy utilities industry, Bruce is currently leading Canberra’s only hydrogen test facility located at CIT’s Fyshwick campus. Launched in December 2018, the Evoenergy Hydrogen Test Facility is a first-of-its-kind facility designed to test locally generated fully renewable zero net emissions hydrogen on a replica gas distribution network, to inform network planning for the future.

Evoenergy’s Hydrogen Test Facility also incorporates an appliance test laboratory so that current gas appliances can be tested on blends of hydrogen and natural gas with the view to understanding how different blends impact useability, performance, safety and emission products.

In his experience leading this project and throughout his career, Bruce understands the technical and practical potential of our energy system, and the importance of agility as we continue to decarbonise our infrastructure.

Bruce has a Master of Business Administration, with qualifications in electrical engineering and extensive experience in electricity distribution, gas transmission, gas distribution, gas network maintenance and construction, project management, WH&S management, environmental management, quality assurance and business management.

Leigh Kennedy is NERA’s General Manager – Hydrogen with a focus on working collaboratively across Australia to develop regional hydrogen technology clusters and building a nationally coordinated Hydrogen Technology, Equipment and Technology (HETS) industry that can be promoted around the world.

Before joining NERA, Leigh worked with Austrade’s international network and government partners to drive Austrade’s global resources and energy foreign direct investment attraction and facilitation strategy and assist clients deliver on their Australian expansion plans. Focus honed-in on renewable energy and hydrogen investment opportunities. He also has significant experience in energy security policy when based in Canberra.

Bio to come!

Bio to come!

Bio to come!

Dr Andrew Feitz is Director of Low Carbon Geoscience and Advice at the Australian Government’s national geoscience agency, Geoscience Australia. Andrew is an environmental engineer and has over 10 years research experience in geological storage of CO2. He leads Geoscience Australia’s research programs and technical advice on hydrogen and geological storage of CO2. Andrew leads hydrogen research under the Australian Government’s Exploring for the Future program, including ongoing development of the Hydrogen Economic Fairways Tool and underground hydrogen salt storage exploration.

Dr Emanuelle Frery is a CSIRO team leader with expertise in natural geogenic hydrogen exploration. She loves to synthesis work from different disciplines and apply her expertise in structural geology to comprehensive assessments of energy production impact on the groundwater systems and the environment. She is passionate about fluid and gas circulation along natural faults and the impact of those circulations on the seismic cycle. She works with a multi-scale approach, from fieldwork to laboratory analyses and to numerical modelling. She acquired a worldwide academic expertise in this field with a PhD thesis on the circulation recorded in the well-known red sandstone of the Colorado Plateau and her implication in the IODP research. Before joining CSIRO, she also worked in the oil and gas industry as a seismic interpreter and a petroleum system analyst.

Dr Paul Medwell is an Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the School of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Adelaide. He has over twenty years of combustion research experience, and in the development and application of advanced laser diagnostic techniques for the measurement of flames and harsh reacting environments. Over the years, Dr Medwell has expanded his research interests to include fluid mechanics and energy utilisation more broadly, as well as biomass and biodigesters. Much of his current work is on the potential of hydrogen in the gas network, especially its integration with end-users.

He has published over 200 scientific articles, and regularly presents his findings to international audiences. In addition to his research work, Dr Medwell serves as an engineering consultant to industry and is an active contributor to the development of standards at national and international level.

Professor Bahman Shabani is the leader of the multidisciplinary Sustainable Hydrogen Energy Laboratory (SHEL) research group at RMIT University. In 2006 he shifted his research toward renewable energy and energy storage solutions with emphasis on hydrogen energy technologies. He was a chief investigator of over $8 million funded projects on fuel cell/hydrogen systems since 2015 and has published over 80 papers in highly respected international journals. He is also serving on the editorial board of top rank international journals in the field such as the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy (IJHE), Nature Scientific Reports.

Bio to come!

Bio to come!

Diane is an outcome and customer-service focused chemical engineer with more than 20 years’ experience in Oil and Gas, Chemical, Petrochemical and Alternative Energy sectors. She has practical experience in project ideation, FEED, construction, commissioning, and operations, with leadership roles in Process Safety and integrated operations. She has provided strategies for Major Hazard Facility approvals and advice on safety regulations compliance for water, carbon capture, hydrogen hubs and future energy industries.

Diane is passionate about envisioning and solving technical, organizational or even industry-wide problems with sustainable solutions. She has also been the founding director of the H2Q Queensland Hydrogen Industry Cluster, was the chair of the H2Q Regulatory approvals working group and is involved in advisory boards of conferences, which provides her with industry insight on the challenges of future energy industries.

Dr Tara Hosseini is a Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO in Australia. Since joining CSIRO In April 2022, she has contributed to a couple of projects related to the decarbonisation of heavy industries in the Heavy Industry Low-Carbon Transition Cooperative Research Centre (HILT CRC) and the integration of renewable energy into various processes for external clients.  She received a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Monash University in 2016 and since then she has worked on research and development of renewable and low-emission energy technologies.

Dr Hosseini has worked on different aspects of the hydrogen supply chain including hydrogen production technologies, hydrogen distribution and end-use. Dr Hosseini has 15+ years of experience in chemical process design, numerical modelling, process simulation and flowsheeting of different chemical/mineral processes using different Process Engineering software, techno-economic assessment, feasibility and market studies. She taught “process design” and “process control” courses at Monash University and the University of Adelaide for more than 4 years.

Before joining CSIRO, she worked at the University of Adelaide as a research fellow (2019-2020) and Lecturer (2020-2022). She completed a couple of projects for the Future Fuels CRC, aimed to develop various techno-economic models for blue and green hydrogen production as well as bioenergy production from different biomass resources (2019-2022). Dr Hosseini has supervised 5 PhD students and over 30 final-year and summer vacation students.

Peter is research professor for advanced materials and research leader at Future Industries Institute of the University of South Australia. Peter has a strong track record in advanced materials for fuel cell technology, nanomaterials for applications in water treatment, and materials for thermal energy storage. He is working at the University of South Australia for the past 20 years  and was Head of School of Advanced Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering and later Head of School of Engineering. He was also Chair and Chief Engineer of the Australian Technology Network’s Solar Car Project including members of five universities in the frame of the 2019 World Solar Challenge. Peter is currently involved in the development of the Scaling Green Hydrogen CRC led by the University of Adelaide.

Mark Paskevicius is Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Curtin University in Western Australia. His research is focussed on the storage of renewable energy. He is dedicated to developing new materials for solid-state hydrogen storage to store energy for automotive, stationary and export applications. He is also leading research into new solid-state ion conductors for battery applications, focussing on boron-rich materials.

Julie is a researcher at the Australian National University. She completed her B.Sc. in Europe (Mines-Telecom Institute, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya), her MASc in Nanotechnology at the University of Waterloo (Canada) and her PhD in Electronics at the University of Montpellier (France) with a E.U. Marie Curie scholarship. She has been a research fellow at ANU since 2019. She is currently the project coordinator for the ACT-H2 program, researching green hydrogen production systems. Julie has been investigating photovoltaic cells for 6 years and photoelectrochemical cells for 3 years, covering design, fabrication, integration and techno-economic analysis. She also has 8 years of experience in epitaxy, characterisation and microfabrication of optoelectronic devices. She enjoys working in multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural environments and is passionate about climate change research and action. Julie is also involved with multiple Women in STEM organisations and always available for outreach and education toward the general public.