Andreas MortensenAndreas Mortensen is currently Professor and Director of the Institute of Materials at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), where he heads the Laboratory for Mechanical Metallurgy. He joined the faculty of EPFL 1997 after ten years, from 1986 to 1996, as a member of the faculty of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he held the successive titles of ALCOA Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor. His research is focussed on the processing, microstructural development and mechanical behavior of advanced metallic materials with particular focus on metal matrix composites and metal foams, on infiltration processing and capillarity, and on damage and fracture in metallic materials. He is author or co-author of two monographs, around one hundred and eighty scientific or technical publications and twelve patents. Born in San Francisco in 1957, of dual (Danish and US) nationality, Andreas Mortensen graduated in 1980 from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris with a Diplôme dIngénieur Civil, and earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT in 1986. Besides his academic employment, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Nippon Steel during part of 1986, and was invited professor at the Ecole des Mines in Paris during the academic year 1995 to 1996. He is a member of the editorial committee of International Materials Reviews and has co-edited four books. He is a Fellow of ASM, a recipient of the Howe Medal and the Grossman Award of the American Society of Metals, was awarded the Péchiney Prize by the French Academy of Sciences and the Res Metallica Chair from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, received three EPFL teaching awards, is one of ISIs Highly Cited authors for Materials Science since 2002 and was awarded an ERC advanced grant in 2012.
Dan RenDan Ren studied Materials Science and Engineering in the Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 2009-2013. He then continued his study as a graduate student in the National University of Singapore with Prof. Jason Boon Siang Yeo and earned his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry in 2017. During his PhD, he developed Cu-based nanostructures and bimetallic systems for efficient and selective electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to multi-carbon products. He also developed in situ tools, especially in situ Raman spectroscopy, for probing electrocatalytic surface during carbon dioxide reduction and revealed the nature of active sites as well as the adsorbed intermediates. In early 2018, he moved to Switzerland and joined LPI as a postdoc. After working with Prof. Michael Graetzel for half a year, he was promoted to group leader and continued leading the solar fuel research subgroup since then. He is now working on electrocatalytic carbon dioxide reduction, operando Raman spectroscopy and system engineering for artificial photosynthesis. He has authored/co-authored >30 publications in prestigious academic journals and presented his work in >10 international conferences. These work have garnered >2000 citations and 6 of them are ESI highly cited papers (top 1% in the discipline of Chemistry). Together with Prof. Graetzel, he has successfully secured several grants both at national and international levels, including 'Solar-Bio Fuels' from Gebert Rüf Stiftung, 'SUN2CHEM' from EU H2020, '112CO2' from EU H2020, 'METHASOL' from EU H2020 and a collaboration grant from Saudi Arabia.