Maria Forsyth

Professor Maria Forsyth “FAA” (Fellow Australian Academy of Sciences), is Director of the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Future Energy Storage Technologies (storEnergy), an Ikerbasque Professor at POLYMAT, University of the Basque Country, Spain. She is the Associate Director in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Electromaterials Science (ACES) and Deputy Director of the Institute for Frontier Materials (IFM) at Deakin University in Australia. In 2018 she was awarded the position of Ikerbasque Professor, at POLYMAT, an institute of the University of the Basque Country in San Sebastian, Spain. In this role she collaborates with the Innovative Polymers group and supervises research projects related to sustainability. Specifically, she is an expert in ionic materials, including ionic liquids, organic ionic plastic crystals, polymer gels and composites, with applications to several areas including materials for CO2 absorption, electrowinning of metals and energy storage. Her work has also focused on understanding the phenomenon of charge transport at metal/electrolyte interfaces and within novel electrolyte materials. NMR techniques have featured strongly in Professor Forsyth’s research where she has applied pulsed field gradient NMR to measure diffusion of ionic species in electrolytes, variable temperature solid state wide line NMR and MAS to investigate structure and dynamics in solids and, most recently, NMR imaging of electrochemical processes. She leads collaborative projects in lithium and sodium battery technologies funded through recent Australian Research Council grants. Her team collaborates very productively with colleagues within academia, CSIRO, DSTO as well as industry to design new materials and processes to control and optimise these phenomena in two key areas - corrosion (e.g. Corrosion Science 2006, Surface and Coatings Technology, 2007) and electrochemical devices (eg., Nature 1999, Science 2002, Science 2008, Journal of Applied Electrochemistry 2008). Specifically, her work has focused on understanding the phenomenon of charge transport at metal/electrolyte interfaces and within novel electrolyte materials. Such materials have included a range of novel ionic liquids, polymer electrolytes and plastic crystals. Professor Forsyth is a co-author of over 600 journal and conference publications attracted more than 25000 citations. She has delivered more than 25 invited and plenary talks in the past 5 years. She has served on several editorial boards and is currently senior editor for Journal of Physical Chemistry letters. She has received the 2020 Victorian Honour Roll of Women, Galileo Galilee award for her contributions to the Polymer Electrolyte and energy storage field and awarded to The Victorian Prize for Science and Innovation (VESKI).