Fabrice Renard, Senior Advisor, Avicenne Energy

With more than 25 years of experience in business consultancy and management of chemical and advanced materials business in Belgium, Morocco, and China, Fabrice gained strong experience on strategy, M&A, manufacturing, marketing, finance, and innovation on high-growth new technology business. Prior joining AVICENNE in 2019, Fabrice was Chief Innovation Officer of the Prayon group. Over 10 years, he was in charge of the global R&D and innovation strategy based on sustainable major trends and declined on nutrition, water, precision farming, rare elements recovery, and energy. One of his core focus was the development of cathode materials. In this field, he earned a strong expertise on the battery value chain and served as COO of Belife, a joint venture with Umicore and as a director of Prayon Pulead Technology, a Chinese-based LFP manufacturer. He holds a master's in chemical engineering, a postgraduate diploma in business administration, an executive degree in tax law, and an executive master's in management.

Shmuel De-Leon, CEO, Shmuel De-Leon Energy Ltd.

Shmuel De-Leon, Founder and CEO of Shmuel De-Leon Energy Ltd., is a leading international expert in the business of energy storage. Prior to founding the company, for over 21 years, Shmuel held various positions as an energy storage, electronic engineering, and quality control team manager. Shmuel holds a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Tel Aviv University, and an M.B.A. in Quality Control and Reliability Engineering from the Technion Institute in Haifa, as well as an Electronic Technician's diploma.

Juergen Janek, PhD, Professor, Solid-State Ionics & Electrochemistry, Justus Liebig University, Giessen

Jürgen Janek has a chair for Physical Chemistry at Justus Liebig University in Giessen (JLU), is director of the JLU Center for Materials Research and Scientific Director of the BELLA lab at KIT, Karlsruhe. He was visiting professor at Seoul National University (South Korea), Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan), and D´Aix-Marseille (France), and he was awarded with an honorary doctorate from TU Delft (Netherlands). He holds numerous patents, has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers and got numerous awards. His research interests focus on the physical chemistry of inorganic solids, solid state ionics, and reactivity, specifically on the properties of mixed ionic-electronic conductors, defect chemistry of ionic materials, kinetics of solid-state reactions, and solid-solid interfaces. In recent years, his research is focused strongly to the chemistry of battery materials, solid electrolytes, and solid-state batteries and operando studies of batteries. He is scientific coordinator of the German Cluster of Competence for Solid State Batteries FESTBATT funded by BMBF (Federal Ministry for Education and Research) and member of the DFG Cluster of Excellence POLIS at Ulm/Karlsruhe.

James Kaschmitter, CEO, SpectraPower LLC

James Kaschmitter is the CEO of SpectraPower, which he founded in 2002. SpectraPower operates a battery research facility in Livermore, CA that performs contract energy storage research, consulting and expert witness services for government, private companies, law firms, startups and investors. Jim has founded, or co-founded, several companies in the energy storage field. He began research in Li-ion batteries in 1989 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). He was co-founder and CEO of PolyStor Corporation starting in 1993. PolyStor is the only U.S. company to have commercially manufactured in high volume in the U.S. all form factors of lithium-ion cells, including cylindrical, prismatic and polymer. In 1997 Jim founded PowerStor Corporation to commercialize the carbon aerogel supercapacitor that he co-invented at LLNL. PowerStor supercapacitors are now manufactured and sold in high volume by Eaton Bussman. He founded UltraCell in 2002, which successfully developed the world’s first reformed methanol micro fuel cell. UltraCell’s micro fuel cells are currently manufactured and sold by Brentronics and are deployed with U.S military and intelligence units, and are in use in combat in the Middle East. Jim holds a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and has a bachelor’s degree in the Physics Honors Program from the University of Utah. He holds more than 20 patents in the alternative energy field. He owns, maintains and operates an experimental aircraft and holds instrument and multi-engine ratings.

Kevin Konecky, Battery and Energy Storage Systems Consultant, Total Battery Consulting

Mr. Konecky brings over 20 years of xEV experience to his work, having worked on multiple complex designs for battery system development, charging system integration, and high-voltage powertrain integration. He is skilled in new product design and development, product testing, product safety, integration of multiple sub-systems for vehicles, new product launches and has expanded his skillset beyond batteries into power electronics. His experience in batteries includes multiple technologies (Li-ion, NiMH, UltraCapacitors, Lead-Acid). Mr. Konecky has worked for multiple OEM and Tier 1 battery suppliers (GM, Fisker, Byton, Cobasys, EnerDel, Lockheed Martin) and has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University (Potsdam, NY) and MS from Purdue (IUPUI - Indianapolis, IN).

Dee Strand, PhD, CSO, R&D, Wildcat Discovery Technologies, Inc.

Dr. Dee Strand is a Senior Scientist at Wildcat Discovery Technologies. Dr. Strand has over twenty years of experience in materials research, development, and commercialization, primarily in the areas of energy storage and electronic applications. Prior to joining Wildcat in 2013, Dr. Strand served as a Research Fellow at Dow Chemical, where she was the technical lead in Dow Energy Materials, as well as the Principal Investigator on external research programs with universities and national labs on battery materials. Dr. Strand also has extensive experience in patent analysis and technical due diligence of new technologies. Dr. Strand completed her PhD in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the supervision of Professor John Schrag. Her PhD research focused on rheology and birefringence of polymeric solutions. Dr. Strand also holds a Master of Science degree in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from North Dakota State University.