International Expert Council (Jury)


Prof. Francis Verpoort is a distinguished expert in organometallic chemistry and functional materials. He leads the Laboratory of Functional Hybrid Materials at Wuhan University of Technology and is the founder and CEO of SAIS Ltd, a company specializing in chemistry, materials, and engineering solutions.


Prof. Polychronopoulou is an expert in catalysis and advanced materials, focusing on energy transition and alternative fuels. She is the founder and CEO of CeCaS spin-off ‘44Fuels’, dedicated to decarbonization technologies. Before joining Khalifa University, she held postdoctoral positions at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA).

Prof. Bessarabov is a recognized expert in hydrogen energy and electrochemical technologies with extensive academic and industrial experience in Canada and South Africa. Since 2010, he has been leading the HySA Infrastructure Center of Competence at NWU and CSIR, focusing on hydrogen and fuel cell technologies.

The main research interests of Professor Chao Chen are hypervalent iodine chemistry and electrophilic cyclisation. He started his independent research as an associate professor at Tsinghua University in May 2011.

Lutz Ackermann studied Chemistry at the Christian Albrecht University of Kiel (Germany), and wrote his PhD with Prof. Alois Fürstner at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung (Mülheim an der Ruhr, 2001). After a postdoctoral stay at UC Berkeley with Prof. Robert G. Bergman, he initiated his independent research career in 2003 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. In 2007, he became Full Professor (W3) at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.