Dr. Michelle Browne receives Daimler and Benz Foundation Fellowship
Michelle Browne heads a Helmholtz Young Investigators Group on electrocatalysis at HZB and is now a fellow of the Daimler and Benz Foundation. © HZB/ K. Fuchs
Michelle Browne heads a Helmholtz Young Investigators Group on electrocatalysis at HZB. She has now been selected as a fellow of the Daimler and Benz Foundation. She will receive 40,000 euros over the next two years and, in addition, access to an excellent research network.
With her research, she wants to contribute to the development of better catalysts for the production of green hydrogen. To increase the percentage of green H2 produced by water splitting compared to the production of grey H2 by steam reformation, it is necessary to improve the efficiency associated with low temperature membrane water splitting technologies (e.g. Anion Exchange Membrane (AEM)).
One way to improve the efficiency is to replace the current state-of the art catalysts with materials that are more active and stable which will result in a drastic paradigm shift in green H2 production. This project will focus on tailoring MXene and metal oxide catalyst layers to produce Green H2 in AEM devices.
Michelle Browne is currently the head of the Helmholtz Young Investigator Electrocatalysis: Synthesis to Device group at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin. She holds a Ph.D in Chemistry from Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). She has received prestigious fellowships and awards for her research, including, the Curious Minds Research Award, L’Oreal UNESCO Rising Talent UK & Ireland Fellowship, International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE) Elsevier Prize for Applied Electrochemistry award and the Clara Immerwahr Award from UniSysCat.
With this programme, the Daimler and Benz Foundation sets out to reinforce the autonomy of the next generation of academics and to support the careers of committed young academics after earning their doctorates.
- Georg Forster Research Fellow explores photocatalystsDr. Moses Alfred Oladele is working on photocatalysis for CO2 conversion in a joint project with the group of Dr. Matt Mayer, HZB, and Prof. Andreas Taubert at the University of Potsdam. The chemist from Redeemer's University in Ede, Nigeria, came to Berlin in the summer of 2024 with a Georg Forster Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and will work at HZB for two years.
- Perovskite solar cells: New Young Investigator Group funded by BMBF at HZBIn the COMET-PV project, Dr Artem Musiienko aims to significantly accelerate the development of perovskite solar cells. He is using robotics and AI to analyse the many variations in the material composition of tin-based perovskites. The physicist will set up a Young Investigator Group at HZB. He will also have an affiliation with Humboldt University in Berlin, where he will gain teaching experience in preparation for a future professorship.
- HZB-postdoc Feng Liang becomes associate Professor at Xi'an Jiaotong UniversityDr. Feng Liang has joined the HZB Institute Solar Fuels in 2021. Now, he has secured an associate professorship at the Green Hydrogen Innovation Center in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China. He will start to build up his research team in June 2025.