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Professor Nazar (Chemistry) attended the meeting organized by the “International Battery Materials Association (IBA)”. Her presentation was on “Creating and understanding stable cathode-electrolyte interfaces for solid state batteries”.

The meeting focused on the latest findings that had led to battery materials of enhanced performance and safety, and to deepened understanding of the electrode processes that determine and dictate the electrochemical performance. Scientists and researchers of battery community around the world participated to share recent advances in battery materials and electrolytes for lithium ion batteries and beyond.

Professor Nazar (Chemistry) discussed “Electrochemical energy storage using lithium sulphur conversion chemistry with liquid and solid state electrolytes” at the meeting.

The Molecular Foundry is a nanoscience research facility that provides visiting researchers (“users”) with access to cutting-edge expertise and instrumentation in a collaborative, multidisciplinary environment. The Molecular Foundry’s 2021 Annual User Meeting will be hosted virtually with free registration to bring our scientific community together in a safe and accessible format. This annual conference focuses on frontier research topics of interest to that community of users, providing a forum to share results and exchange ideas, and bringing together leading researchers, junior scientists, postdocs, and students.

Professor Li (Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering) served as the President of the Fuel Cell Division, International Association for Hydrogen Energy (IAHE), and the Fuel Cell Division that organized the 2021 World Fuel Cell Conference (WFCC).

The WFCC is a multidisciplinary conference on the latest development and advancement of hydrogen and fuel cells, and provides a forum for the exchange of the latest scientific and technical information, for the dissemination of high-quality research results, and for the debate and shaping of future directions and priorities in hydrogen fuel cell science, technology, engineering, application and commercialization. This conference targets technical issues and interconnections between fuel cells and hydrogen.

Professor. Ghaddar (Management Sciences) gave a keynote talk on “Polynomial optimization in power and water network operations”. She discussed several challenging optimization problems in power and water networks involving both operational decisions and non-linear models of the underlying physics described by the network. However, these networks exhibit a nice sparse structure. This talk provided an overview of approaches that combined recent advances in conic relaxation of polynomial optimization problems along with exploiting the underlying problem. These approaches were demonstrated in applications arising in power and water networks.

Professor Li (Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering) gave a talk on “Development of advanced MEAs for next-generation PEM fuel cells”.

This workshop was held in collaboration with the School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Tehran and the Engineering Skills Development Centre (ESDC).

Professor Nazar (Chemistry) participated as a panelist along with a number of acclaimed scholars to discuss the current and future developments in the electrochemical energy and battery sector.

The forum fostered discussions on the next-generation batteries as well as the lithium-ion battery cells. The demand for the next-generation batteries has been on a steady rise because of its key features of light weight and greater energy density. Lithium-ion batteries are widely being used as the power source for electric vehicles around the world. The open forum invited the public into the discussion on the newest trends, product developments and solutions.