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An electronic engineer and a physicist, Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz is a professor at the Gleb Wataghin Physics Institute of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and the current scientific director of FAPESP (Sao Paulo Research Foundation). FAPESP’s bioenergy program, BIOEN, aims to integrate comprehensive research on sugarcane and other plants that can be used as biofuel sources, focusing not just on biofuel technologies but also on the sugarcane plant itself, including genomics, plant breeding and farming technologies as well as social, economic and environmental impact studies.

Clare P. Grey, is the Geoffrey Moorhouse-Gibson Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge University and the Associate Director of the Northeastern Chemical Energy Storage Center at Stony Brook University. Her research interests include the use of solid state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and diffraction methods to investigate structure and dynamics in materials for energy storage and conversion (batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells) and in environmental chemistry.   

Daniel G. Nocera is the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy at Harvard University. His group pioneered studies of the basic mechanisms of energy conversion in biology and chemistry with primary focus in recent years on the generation of solar fuels. He has recently accomplished a solar fuels process that captures photosynthesis and constructed an artificial leaf, which uses sunlight to directly produce the solar fuels of hydrogen and oxygen from water with sunlight as the energy input.

Professor of Energy Policy University of Sussex, and Research Director of UK Energy Research Centre, Jim Watson has 20 years’ research experience on a range of energy, climate change and innovation policy issues. His most recent research has focused on the uncertainties facing carbon capture and storage technologies, low carbon innovation in China, community energy in the UK, and the governance implications of sustainable infrastructure systems. He frequently advises UK government departments and other organisations.

Photo: RSC/ John Rogers

The breath of life: writer and arborist  William Bryant Logan on why breath is the measure of life,  chemist Renato Zenobi on our individually unique ‘breath-prints’ and tenor John Potter on the relationship between breath and the singing voice.