Kumar Raju is a Faraday Institution Research Fellow at the Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. His academic journey commenced with his doctoral research at the University of Madras, postdoctoral work at Hanyang University, South Korea, and subsequent tenure as a Senior Research Scientist at the Energy Centre, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa. His current research focuses on processing advanced cathode materials, encompassing the development of innovative methods for structuring electrode materials and studying their processing into advanced electrodes for batteries and supercapacitors.
Charl J. Jafta is a Senior Electrochemist at BASF, Beachwood, Ohio, USA, specialising in cathode materials. He had previously a brief tenure at NOVONIX Anode Materials in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he improved the manufacturing of anode materials. He has also been a Research and Development Associate in the Electrification and Energy Infrastructure Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, focussing on developing solid-state lithium-ion batteries. He has also done postdoctoral work at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, where he developed cells to characterise lithium-sulfur batteries by small-angle neutron scattering. He obtained his PhD from the Physics Department at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, where he developed synthetic methods to control the manganese valence states of high-voltage and high-capacity cathodes. He also researched the conversion of locally mined electrolytic manganese dioxide to nano-sized MnO2 for supercapacitors. He has published over 100 publications, two book chapters, and filed two patents.
Eric Lichtfouse is a Distinguished Talent Professor at the International Research Center for Renewable Energy, State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China. He is teaching environmental chemistry and scientific writing and is the Chief Editor of the Journal Environmental Chemistry Letters. He graduated with a Bachelor and a Master of Science in Organic Chemistry from Claude Bernard University, Lyon, and a PhD Thesis in Organic Geochemistry from Louis Pasteur University, Strasbourg, in 1989. After post-doctoral positions at Indiana University, USA, in 1990, and the KFA Juelich Research Center, in 1992, he did molecular and isotopic research on carbon and contaminants in soils, waters, plants and the atmosphere at Pierre and Marie Curie University, Nancy University, Bourgogne University, and Aix-Marseille University. He invented carbon 13-relative dating and discovered molecular temporal pools in environmental media, thus opening the discipline of single-sample molecular chronology.
