Who we are

Uppsala University, founded in 1477, is the oldest University in the Nordic countries, and generally ranked among the top 100 universities in the world. Today, it trains more than 43000 students, and employs 6000 people. There are about 2500 active graduate students; 44% of these are women. Each year, the University awards some 270 doctoral degrees.

The Ångström Advanced Battery Centre (ÅABC) is an integral part of the Department of Chemistry – Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University; it is housed within the Ångström Laboratory – one of Europe’s best equipped Materials Research Laboratories.

The Centre involves the full-time activities of >70 researchers, of whom 8 are Senior Staff; the remainders are PhD students, postdocs, researchers and assistant professors. The group produce ca. 5 PhD theses annually. It is the leading research environments for the development of electrochemical storage materials and advanced battery technology in the Nordic countries.

It is a member of the Swedish Electromobility Centre. The focus of research is on modern commercial and next-generation Li-ion batteries, and future battery chemistries such as Na-ion, Li-S, organic electrodes, solid-state, etc. The expertise lies in synthesis of electrode and electrolyte materials and electrochemical testing, but equally important are the development of in operando structural characterization techniques and surface science techniques.

The Centre also has vivid activities on multi-scale modelling of batteries and battery materials, spanning from materials modelling to electrochemical simulations.

Università di Pisa, University of Pisa (UNIPI), founded in 1343, is one of the most ancient and prestigious universities in Europe.

UNIPI counts twenty large departments covering all disciplinary areas, with high-level research centres in the sectors of physics, computer science, engineering, mathematics, among others. The academic staff counts around 1400 professors and researchers, 1500 administrative employees, while the enrolled students are more than 50.000 (B.Sc. plus M.Sc.) including students from other Italian regions and from abroad more than 700 were the PhD students enrolled and about 220 the graduated in 2018.

The vitality of higher education and scientific research determines its strength: UNIPI is committed to promoting and supporting research in every field of knowledge, encouraging innovation and openness to new subjects and collaborations between different disciplines. Thanks to the quality of the research undertaken by its academic staff, individually or in teams, UNIPI holds a prominent position in the national and international scientific context; the 2019 QS World University Rankings by Subject ranks UNIPI in the top 100 among 1200 Universities in five subjects.

The Department of Energy, Systems, Territory and Constructions Engineering (DESTeC) led by Prof. Umberto Desideri, UNIPI principal investigator, is addressing the challenges of modern energy systems. DESTeC staff, with its more than 60 faculties, is dedicated to thermal engines and power plant technology, from system level including building engineering to detailed level like heat transfer and fluid-dynamics, as well as energy storage; other core competences are related to electrical and power engineering including grid control and design. The Department may provide competence and expertise in several fields concerning energy conversion and energy infrastructures from system level to detailed modelling. Ongoing projects concern micro CHP plants, integration of renewable energy into grids, integrated renewable systems for energy supply to buildings, electric and thermal energy storage and hybrid vehicles as well as biofuels production.

The Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering (DICI) to which Dr. Antonio Bertei belongs to, comprises about 100 faculty members with competences spanning from electrochemical engineering, microfluidics, chemical reaction engineering, control theory, life cycle assessment and many other research areas. The Department has been leading and participating to national and international projects regarding electrochemical energy conversion and storage, focusing mainly on the modelling of the elementary physical and electrochemical phenomena at the electrode and cell level with special focus on novel fuel cell concepts as well as on degradation phenomena affecting fuel cell and battery materials. Ongoing projects concern advanced design of electrode architectures at the microstructural level and modelling of dendrite growth in batteries.

Aalto University works towards a better world through top-quality research, interdisciplinary collaboration and pioneering education. The university was founded 2010 as a merger of the Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki School of Economics, and the University of Art and Design Helsinki. The Aalto community consists of about 19000 students (of them, about 12% international) and more than 4600 employees. The School of Chemical Engineering has among its research priorities advanced metals, active and functional materials, clean technologies, etc.

The School deals with materials, their production and related processes, design and applications and has a strong cooperation with the Finnish industry. The Department of Chemistry and Materials Science (Aalto CMAT) focuses on advanced functional materials, chemical synthesis, energy storage and conversion, as well as molecular and materials modelling. Aalto CMAT has identified energy storage as one of the strategic research areas, and therefore the proposed tasks within this proposal fits very well into this topic.

The University of Jyväskylä started in 1863 as a Jyväskylä Teacher Seminary. Today, it is ranked among the best 400 universities (THE rankings 2019), and is home to over 14000 students, with over 2500 staff in total, and over 1400 graduate students, of those, more than half (840) are women. The number of doctoral degrees awarded annually totals almost 150.

The University is divided into six faculties, of which the Faculty of Mathematics and Science is the largest and one of the most international faculties. The Departments of Chemistry, Physics and Biological & Environmental Science have a joint research unit titled the NanoScience Centre, a hub to cross-disciplinary science and hosting over half of the research groups within the Department of Chemistry, including the group of Prof. Petri Pihko. The Department of Chemistry focuses on structural and synthetic chemistry, renewable natural resources and chemistry of living environment, computational chemistry and spectroscopy, nanoscience and chemistry education, and produces typically 8-10 doctoral degrees per year.

The major theme of research in the group of prof. Petri Pihko is to establish novel and efficient strategies for chemical synthesis with the help of catalytic transformations, especially organo- and enzyme catalysis, and oxidative catalysis. The group develops ready-to-use catalytic tools for synthesis as well as applying them to construct biologically and structurally interesting natural products and industrially relevant targets. We also focus on understanding the underlying mechanistic and structural details through physical organic chemistry. The group is home to ca. 8 active researchers, with three postdoctoral researchers. The group is part of the community of Structural and Synthetic Chemistry, with seven professors and nine senior researchers leading the research. The NMR laboratory, hosting instruments up to 800 MHz, is led jointly by Dr. Elina Sievänen and Prof. Perttu Permi.

The Research Centre for Natural Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (RCNS-HAS) carries out multidisciplinary research in natural sciences. The institution was founded in 2012 by merging several research institutes from the organizational framework of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS). RCNS-HAS fulfills scientific, technical, educational and social missions and it acts as a publicly financed professional research centre in Hungary.

One of the focus areas in RCNS-HAS is the development of novel functional materials relevant to environmental awareness and sustainability. These activities are carried out at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and the Institute of Material and Environmental Chemistry units of the Centre. The Theoretical Chemistry Research Group provides a theoretical background for ongoing synthetic, material science and structural research at RCNS-HAS.

The group has long-standing expertise in joint computational-experimental mechanistic studies of organic and inorganic reactions of current synthetic interest. A wide range of modern computational methods are used to model chemical reactivity in organic and aqueous solutions. Via recent collaborations with industrial partners, the group has gained considerable experience in the application of virtual screening and quantitative structure-property relationship modelling techniques as well.

Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology is a private graduate research institute in Moscow, Russia. Established in 2011 in collaboration with MIT, Skoltech cultivates a new generation of researchers and entrepreneurs, promotes advanced scientific knowledge and fosters innovative technology to address critical issues facing the world. Skoltech applies the best Russian and international research and educational practices, with particular emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation.

The Center for Energy Science and Technology (CEST) is one of the Skoltech research centers which is focused on the research and development of energy systems and technologies required by the growing applications of energy conversion and storage technologies in various end-user industries (renewable energy power generation). One of the key research areas of CEST is investigation of new materials and development of modeling tools for different electrochemical storage technologies including Redox Flow Batteries, and hence the proposed tasks within this proposal fits very well into this topic.