Prof. Dr. Mohammad Shahidehpour

Dr. Mohammad Shahidehpour is a University Distinguished Professor, Bodine Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Director of the Robert W. Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He has also been the Principal Investigator of several research grants on power system operation and control. His project on Perfect Power Systems has converted the entire IIT Campus to an islandable microgrid. His CSMART (Center for Smart Grid Applications, Research, and Technology) at IIT has promoted the smart grid cybersecurity research for managing the resilience of wireless networked communication and control systems in smart cities. His SPIKE initiative facilitated the design and the implementation of affordable microgrids in impoverished nations. He is the recipient of the 2009 honorary doctorate from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest.  Dr. Shahidehpour was the recipient of the IEEE Burke Hayes Award for his research on hydrokinetics, IEEE/PES Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award, IEEE/PES Douglas M. Staszesky Distribution Automation Award, and the Edison Electric Institute's Power Engineering Educator Award. He has co-authored 6 books and 500 technical papers on electric power system operation and planning, and served as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. He is a Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and an Academician of the US National Academy of Engineering. The title of his speech in ICCE-2018 will be: "Transactive Energy for Promoting the Clean Energy Operation with Variable Renewable Energy Market in Electric Power Systems"

Dr. Petra Bele

Dr. Petra Bele studied physics at the Naturwissenschaftliche Technische Akademie in Isny, Germany, and later received her PhD from the University of Yamanashi, Japan. She started her scientific career at the Max-Planck-Institut for Medical Reserach in Heidelberg and is a permanent senior staff member at the Department of Physics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) since 2005.

With a fundamental background in Electron Spin Resonance (EPR) and Magnetically Modulated Microwave Absorption (MMMA) on organic metals and superconductors she was amongst scientists, who developed the MMMAtechnique.

After switching her scientific interest to a new major research field, Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) on nanomaterials and biological samples, her expertise includes, besides the imaging technique, image processing and 3D-reconstruction on biological (proteins, DNA) and solid state samples (nanoparticles). She developed and evaluated a novel electron detector system (Imaging Plate Scanner), which helped to push imaging and reconstruction resolution limits of biological cryo-samples (weak phase objects) to lower values. She subsequently established advanced TEM image processing methodology for characterization of catalyst systems for fuel cells.

Dr. Bele is a member of the Editorial Board (Associate Editor) for the scientific journal "Fuel Cells – From Fundamentals to Applied Systems" since 2007. 

The title of her speech in ICCE-2018 will be: "How to "Pimp" Older Transmission Electron Microscopes for a Thorough Unbiased Fuel Cell Catalyst Characterization"

Prof. Dr. Steffen Lehmann

Dr. Steffen Lehmann, born in Stuttgart, Germany, is the Professor of Sustainable Architecture and Director of the Innovation Cluster for Sustainable Cities at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Prior to this, he was for over 13 years a tenured Chair Professor in Australia, where he has held a range of senior leadership positions at high-ranking universities. He studied in the 1980s at the Architectural Association in London and completed a PhD at the TU-Berlin. He subsequently worked with James Stirling in London, and Arata Isozaki in Tokyo, before establishing his own research-driven studio in Berlin: the s_Lab. He founded his own practice in 1993 to pursue a more ethically correct practice. Since then, he has been practising as a licensed architect and urban designer first in Berlin, then increasingly worldwide including in Asia-Pacific region. He held the UNESCO Chair in Sustainable Urban Development for Asia and the Pacific from 2008 to 2010; and was a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and a DAAD-Professor at TU-Munich and at TU-Berlin. His recent books with Routledge are concerning urban density: 'Low Carbon Cities' (2015) and 'Growing Compact' (2017). For more information, see:  www.city-futures.org.uk. The title of his speech in ICCE-2018 will be: "Green Urbanism - Sustainable Cities"

Prof. Dr. Uğur Soytaş

Dr. Uğur Soytaş is the Co-editor of Energy Economics and is also editing the Routledge Handbook of Energy Economics for Taylor & Francis (expected to come out in 2019). He received his BS in Business Administration from Middle East Technical University (METU). He holds an MBA and a PhD degree from Texas Tech University. After completing his PhD, he worked as a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Economics at TTU for a semester. He currently works as Professor of Economics at METU. He has been a visiting research scholar at the Department of Finance and Real Estate at University of Texas at Arlington between Sep. 2016 and June 2017. His research follows two tracks: energy-economy-environment-society nexus and energy commodity markets. He uses empirical methods and an interdisciplinary approach to investigate these issues. He has published several papers in high impact peer reviewed journals such as Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Commodity Markets, Energy Economics, Energy, Energy Policy, Ecological Economics, Applied Energy, Annals of Operations Research, Journal of Policy Modeling, Global Finance Journal, and Emerging Markets Finance and Trade. He has over 4800 citations, his h-index is 23 and i10-index is 26 according to Google Scholar. Several of his papers are recognized as highly influential in the energy economics (1 article), and environmental and ecological economics (5 articles) fields. He has received several academic performance awards at METU and the 1998-1999 Outstanding Graduate Instructor award at TTU. According to teaching evaluations, he is usually ranked in the top 10% of all METU faculty (approximately 2000 faculty members at METU). In terms of total academic performance points, he is consistently ranked number 1 among all faculty members (approximately 80) at the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences at METU since 2010. The title of his speech in ICCE-2018 will be: " Energy-Economy-Environment-SOCIETY "