Valeria Nicolosi Keynote Speaker

Prof. Valeria Nicolosi works at the leading edge of research and innovation on new types of energy storage devices. This ground-breaking work has come to the attention of the business world as the possibilities for this technology are both enormous and game changing.

In talks, she outlines how plentiful natural material such as graphene can be harnessed to produce cost effective and sustainable energy sources. Furthermore, these new forms of energy storage are flexible – they can be printed on a variety of surfaces including paper, metal and skin. They can be small enough to go on a food label or a piece of clothing or they can be scaled up for larger uses. This changes how we think about design and function and opens up endless new innovations which are cost effective and climate friendly.

Valeria is Professor in the School of Chemistry, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) where she holds the Chair of Nanomaterials and Advanced Microscopy. She is a Principal Investigator in the AMBER (Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research) Centre, which provides a partnership between leading researchers in material science and industry to develop new materials and devices for a range of sectors, particularly the ICT, medical devices and industrial technology sectors. She is also working in the CRANN (the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices), which is one of the largest research institutions in TCD and Ireland’s leading nanoscience institute.

She is also the head of the Characterisation and Processing of Advanced Materials (CPAM) group. The main focus of this group is to conduct interdisciplinary research on the processing and cutting-edge electron microscopy characterisation of low-dimensional nanomaterials and two-dimensional inorganic materials, nanotubes and nanowires. One of the core activities of the group is to use these novel 2D materials for the development of more efficient energy storage devices.

Valeria received a BSc (Hons) in Industrial Chemistry from the University of Catania (Italy). She has a Ph.D. in PHysics from the University of Dublin, Trinity College. She moved to the University of Oxford in 2008 as a Marie Curie Fellow, to work in the field of advanced electron microscopy.

In 2008, she was also awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering/EPSRC Fellowship. This fellowship provided a total of 1M EUR funding for the next five years. In Oct 2009, she was elected Kurti Fellow at Brasenose College Oxford. In 2011, she was awarded a 1.5M EUR starting grant from the European Research Council to expand her work in processing and advanced characterisation of nanomaterials devoted to the development of novel energy storage devices. In 2012, she returned to Trinity College Dublin as a Research Professor.

In October 2021, Valeria was elected as a member of the Council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.  This organisation brings together young scientists from all over the world with Nobel Laureates in a comprehensive scientific programme.

Valeria has published more than 200 high-impact-papers, in Science, Nature and Nature Nanotechnology amongst others, and presented at more than 150 major conferences and public events.