Plenary Speakers

Joanne Etheridge is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Monash University. She obtained a degree and PhD in physics from the University of Melbourne and RMIT University, respectively, before appointments at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy and Newnham College, including a Rosalind Franklin Research Fellowship and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. She returned to Melbourne to join Monash University where she established the Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy. She conducts research in the theory and development of new electron scattering methods for determining the atomic and electronic structure of condensed matter. She applies these methods to understand structure-property relationships in functional materials, including materials for controlling light, energy generation and storage. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.

Peter Rosenthal obtained a BA in physics from Harvard College and a PhD in biophysics from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He then moved to the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, before joining the Division of Physical Biochemistry at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in 2005 (now part of the Francis Crick Institute).

Sergei V. Kalinin is a Weston Fulton chair professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. From 2022 to 2023, he was a principal scientist at the Amazon Grand Challenge (moon shot factory). Before then, he spent 20 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a corporate fellow and group leader at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences.

Sergei has co-authored >700 publications, with a total citation of >63,000 and an h-index of >120. He is a fellow of NAI, Academia Europaea, AAAS, MRS, APS, IoP, IEEE, Foresight Institute, and AVS; a recipient of the APS Adler prize (2024), AVS Medard Welch prize (2023), RMS medal for Scanning Probe Microscopy (2015); Blavatnik Award for Physical Sciences (2018), Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) (2009); Burton medal of Microscopy Society of America (2010); 5 R&D100 Awards; and a number of other distinctions.

Dr. Y. Shirley Meng is the Liew Family Professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. Dr. Meng is the director of Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA), an innovation hub funded in 2024 by US Department of Energy, Office of Science.  

She is the principal investigator of the research group - Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion (LESC), that was established at University of California San Diego since 2009. She held the Zable Chair Professor in Energy Technologies at UC San Diego from 2017-2022 and founded the Sustainable Power and Energy Center (SPEC) in 2016. Dr. Meng has received several prestigious awards.