What does it mean to be plenary speaker at your career stage?
As it is my first plenary talk at such a big conference, I have to completely rethink the presentation. I am a bit anxious about it, but I think with the time I will get more used to the idea! I need to take the best material I produced over the last few years, adapt it in a storyline that could be interesting for everyone, even people that may not be used with my research field. I am weighing every single slide and for this reason, I already started preparing the presentation 6 months in advance.
Your field of research is chemical reaction engineering: what does it mean?
Chemical reaction engineering deals with the design and operation of chemical reactors. The research in this filed may seem outdated, but this is not the case. There are many new processes to design and the energy transition is pushing the boundaries of CRE because of the need to switch to new raw materials, to minimize the CO2 emissions and to adapt to intermittent energy sources as solar or wind energy.
"About renewable energy: in your talk you will talk about energy storage with the production of chemical molecules. Can you tell us something about that?"
Yes! Renewable energy is unfortunately intermittent by nature. We hence need to produce something to store energy when this is available in excess. Nowadays this is done mainly with batteries, but their capacity is limited. Therefore, I am researching ways to convert electricity.
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