Speakers
Kjell Aleklett
Professor, Uppsala University, Sweden
Kjell Aleklett is Professor of Physics and leader of the Global Energy Systems Group at Uppsala University, Sweden. He holds a doctorate degree from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and worked as a post-doctoral staff scientist at the Natural Science Laboratory in Studsvik, Sweden from 1977 to 1985. In 1986 he was appointed associate professor at Uppsala University. He became full professor in 2000. In 1978-79 and again in 1983, he was invited to Lawrence Berkley Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley, to work with Nobel Prize winner Glenn T. Seaborg, a collaboration that continued for 20 years.
Professor Aleklett’s interest in global energy issues began in 1994 and has since grown dramatically. He is cofounder of ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas and he organized the first ever International Workshop on Oil Depletion in May 2002 at Uppsala University. Since 2003 he has been president of ASPO, www.peakoil.net.
In 2005 he was asked to give testimony on Peak Oil before the United States House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality. In 2007 he was asked to write a report for the OECD about future global oil production to serve as a background document for the first International Transport Forum in Leipzig, in May, 2008. Publications and more information can be found on the Global Energy Systems website, www.fysast.uu.se/ges.
Ola Alterå
State Secretary at the Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications, Sweden
Ola Alterå is State Secretary at the Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications. His areas of responsibility include Energy, State Ownership Policy, Primary Industries and Sustainable Development. State Secretary Alterå holds a M.Sc. in Engineering Physics from Chalmers University of Technology and a degree in Environmental Economics from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Before joining the ministry, Ola Alterå was the Managing Director of the Swedish District Heating Association. He has also been Secretary-General of the Centre Party, Principal Administrative Officer of the Department for Environmental Economics at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, Political Adviser at the Prime Minister’s Office and Chair of the Centre Party Youth Organisation. Other previous assignments include Member of the Board of the Centre Party, Member of the Board of Euroheat & Power, Chair of the Board of Centertidningar AB and Member of the Swedish Gene Technology Advisory Board
Lennart Bengtsson
Professor, Max Planck Institute, Hamburg, Germany
Lennart Bengtsson has been Deputy Director and Head of Research at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, U.K. between 1976 and 1981, and from 1982 to 1990 he was Director at the Centre. He directed the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg from 1991 to 2000. Since 2000 he is Professor at the University of Reading, and still actively involved with the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. He has received numerous awards for his scientific work in meteorology and climate research. In 2005 he received the René Descartes Prize for Collaborative Research by the European Commission and in 2006 he received the International Meteorological Organization (IMO) Prize of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). In 2007 he was elected Honorary Member of the American Meteorological Society and in 2008 Honorary Doctor of Uppsala University.
Bernard Bulkin
Dr and Chairman of the Board, Chemrec AB 
Bernie Bulkin is a leading voice on issues related to energy and environment. His activities span business, government advisory, communication, and educational roles. He is Chairman of AEA Technology plc, a leading environmental consultancy, Chairman of Swedish company Chemrec AB, and a board member of Severn Trent plc, Ze-gen Corp. and Accelergy Corp. He is Venture Partner with the leading California firm Vantage Point, associated with their Clean Tech practice. Bernie is Commissioner for Energy and Transport at the UK Sustainable Development Commission. He is a Professorial Fellow of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, and serves on numerous charitable boards, including Council of the Royal Institution, Council of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of Chicago School of Physical Sciences Advisory Board, and Editorial Advisory Board of Energy and Environmental Science. Bernie Bulkin’s weekly radio broadcasts, Environment on the Edge, can be heard on VoiceAmerica –The Green Talk Network. He is the author of more than 100 papers and two books. He has been honoured with the Coblentz Award, the Oscar Foster Award, Sigma Xi Distinguished Research Citation, Society of Applied Spectroscopy Gold Medal, and Purdue University Distinguished Alumnus. Dr Bulkin was formerly Chief Scientist of BP.
Peter Cox
Professor of Climate System Dynamics,University of Exeter, UK 
Peter Cox is Professor of Climate System Dynamics and leader of the “Climate Change and Sustainable Futures” theme at the University of Exeter. He has previously held posts at the Met Office-Hadley Centre (1990-2004) and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (2004-2006) where he was Science Director for Climate Change. Prof Cox’s personal research has focussed on interactions between the land-surface and climate, culminating in the first climate projections to include vegetation and the carbon cycle as interactive elements. These simulations demonstrated the potential for the land carbon cycle to provide a significant acceleration of global warming (Cox et al., 2000), and also suggested that the Amazon rainforest could “dieback” under climate change (Cox et al. 2008, 2004). Prof. Cox was a lead-author on the IPCC Fourth Assessment report, is a member of the Royal Society’s expert groups on “Ground-level ozone in the 21st century” and “Geoengineering the climate”, and is a high-cited author in global warming research (http://esi-topics.com/gwarm2006/interviews/PeterCox.html).
Selected references from recent work
Mercado, L.M., Bellouin, N., Sitch, S., Boucher, O., Huntingford, C., Wild, M. and Cox, P.M. (2009). Impact of changes in diffuse radiation on the global land carbon sink, Nature, 458, 1014-1018.
Cox, P.M., Harris, P., Huntingford C., Betts, R.A., Collins, M., Jones, C.D., Jupp, T.E., Marengo J., Nobre, C., 2008. Increasing risk of Amazonian drought due to decreasing aerosol pollution. Nature, 453, 212-216.
Sitch, S., Cox, P.M., Collins, W., Huntingford, C., 2007. Indirect radiative forcing of climate change through ozone effects on the land-carbon sink. Nature, 448, 791-794.
Gedney, N., Cox, P.M., Betts, R.A., Boucher, O., Huntingford, C., and Stott, P.A., 2006. Detection of a direct carbon dioxide effect in continental river runoff records. Nature, 439, 835-888.
Cox P.M., Betts R.A., Collins M., Harris C., Huntingford C., Jones C.D., 2004. Amazon dieback under climate-carbon cycle projections for the 21st century. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 78, 137-156.
Cox P.M., Betts R.A., Jones C.D., Spall S.A. & Totterdell I.J., 2000. Acceleration of global warming due to carbon cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model. Nature , 408, 184-187
Mujid Kazimi
Director, Center for advanced nuclear energy systems, Boston, USA
Mujid S. Kazimi is Professor of Nuclear and Mechanical Engineering and director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (CANES) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He holds the Tokyo Electric Power Company Professorship in Nuclear Engineering at MIT. His interests involve the design of advanced light water reactors, in particular advanced fuel designs, and the development of the nuclear fuel cycle to improve its economy, safety and proliferation resistance. He is a member of the Board of Managers of Battelle Energy Alliance, which manages the Idaho National Laboratory for the US government. He has served as a member of several National Academy of Engineering Committees, most recently the committees on The Hydrogen Economy (2003-04), and on The US DOE R&D Programs for Development of Nuclear Energy (2006-07). His recent international services include science advisory panels of institutions in Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Spain, and Switzerland, as well as membership of the Board of Trustees of AlQuds University in Jerusalem. He has authored more than two hundred papers in journals and conferences and the two-volume textbook Nuclear Systems on thermal hydraulic design and safety analysis of nuclear reactors.
Dr. Kazimi was born in Jerusalem, Palestine. He obtained the B.Eng. from University of Alexandria, Egypt, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT, all in Nuclear Engineering. He is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Julia King
Professor and Vice-Chancellor, Aston University, UK
Julia King obtained her PhD in metallurgy fracture mechanics from Cambridge University. After sixteen years as an academic researcher and university lecturer at Cambridge and Nottingham universities, she joined Rolls-Royce in 1994. At Rolls-Royce she held a number of senior executive positions. In 2002 she became Chief Executive of the Institute of Physics, and in 2004 she returned to academia as Principal of the Engineering Faculty at Imperial College, London. In December 2006 she became Vice-Chancellor of Aston University. She works closely with the U.K. Government as a non-executive member of the Committee on Climate Change, the Technology Strategy Board and, the DIUS Strategic Board, a member of the Ministerial Group on Manufacturing, and has recently been appointed to the Committee on Climate Change. She spent four years advising the Ministry of Defence as Chair of the Defence Science Advisory Council. She is a member of the Governing Board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. Julia King was appointed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, in March 2007 to lead the ‘King Review’ to examine the vehicle and fuel technologies that, over the next 25 years, could help to reduce carbon emissions from road transport. The final recommendations were published in March 2008. She has published over 160 papers on fatigue and fracture in structural materials and developments in aerospace and marine propulsion technology. Her research has been recognised through the award of the Grunfeld, Bengough and Kelvin medals. In 1997 she was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering and in the July 1999 Queen’s Birthday Honours she was made a CBE for “Services to Materials Engineering”. She is a Liveryman of the Goldsmiths’ Company, an Honorary Graduate of Queen Mary, University of London, and an Honorary Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, and of Cardiff University.
Tomas Kåberger
Director General, Swedish Energy Agency
Tomas Kåberger holds a PhD in Physical Resource Theory from Chalmers University of Technology and is an adjunct professor at the International Institute of Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund University. Besides research he has served in leading positions of energy companies as well as board member of environmental organisations, industrial federations in the energy area and government committees. He is now Director General of the Swedish Energy Agency.
Klaus Lackner
Professor, Columbia University, New York, USA
Klaus Lackner is since 2001 a Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University, New York. He graduated 1978 from Heidelberg University where he acquired a PhD in theoretical particle physics. He worked at California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1983. He has a very wide research interest. In recent years, he has published on the behaviour of high explosives, novel approaches to inertial confinement fusion, and numerical algorithms. His interest in self-replicating machine systems has been recognized by Discover Magazine as one of seven ideas that could change the world. Presently he is developing innovative approaches to energy issues of the future. He has been instrumental in forming ZECA, the Zero Emission Coal Alliance, which is an industry-led effort to develop coal power with zero emissions to the atmosphere. His recent work is on environmentally acceptable technologies for the use of fossil fuels.
George A. Olah
1994 Nobel Laureate Chemistry, University of Southern California
George A. Olah was born 1927 in Budapest Hungary. He obtained his education including his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Budapest. In 1956, Olah left Hungary and moved to Canada and then to the US. From 1957 until 1964 he worked for the Dow Chemical Company. Returning to academic life he was on the faculty of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He is since 1977 Distinguished Professor and Director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Institute at the University of Southern California. He and his coworkers carried out research on hydrocarbon chemistry and discovered fundamental aspects of carbocations and superacids. For his discoveries, he was awarded the unshared 1994 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He has published more than 1400 scientific papers and authored or edited some 20 books. He holds more than 120 patents. His current research interests are in new hydrocarbon chemistry and energy areas covering chemical carbon dioxide recycling and the derived “methanol economy”. He has received many awards and recognitions, including 12 honorary degrees from various universities and were elected a member (or foreign member) of some 20 National Academies and Scientific Societies.
Robert Pitz-Paal
Professor, Germany Aerospace Center, Köln, Germany
Prof. Dr. Robert Pitz-Paal is head for solar research in the Institute of Technical Thermodynamics at the DLR (German Aerospace Centre) with approx. 70 members of staff located in Cologne, Stuttgart (Germany) and Almería (Spain). This position is jointly assigned with a professorship for Solar Technology at the RWTH Aachen University.
He has been active in the field of concentration solar technologies for more than 20 years and has served as associate editor for the ASME Journal on Solar Energy Engineering and the Journal of Solar Energy. He has been very active in various roles in the SolarPACES (Solar Power and Chemical Energy Systems) implementing agreement of the International Energy Agency and is its vice-chairman today.
Carlo Rubbia
1984 Nobel Laureate Physics, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
Carlo Rubbia graduated in Physics at Scuola Normale of Pisa. In 1959 he obtained his PhD from Columbia University (USA). Since 1961 he has been working at CERN, Geneva, becoming its Director General from 1989 and 1994. From 1972 to 1989 he has held the Higgings Professorship of Physics at Harvard University. From 1999 to 2005 he was the President of the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment (ENEA). He is currently principal Scientific Adviser of the Spanish Research Centre for Energy, Environment and Technology (CIEMAT), and a member of the high-level Advisory Group on Energy and Climate Change set up by EU's President Barroso in 2007. In March 2009 he has been appointed as Special Adviser for Energy to the Secretary General of ECLAC, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, based in Santiago (Chile). Rubbia is noted for his work in high-energy physics using the considerable accelerator capacity of CERN. In 1984 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Simon van der Meer "for their decisive contributions to the large project, which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction". He has also been one of the leaders in a collaboration effort deep in the Gran Sasso Laboratory, designed to detect any sign of decay of the proton, where an innovative detector has been installed to explore neutrino signals of cosmic nature. During the 1990s Rubbia proposed the concept of an energy amplifier (ADS) – a novel and safe way of producing practically unlimited nuclear energy exploiting present-day accelerator technologies from natural thorium and depleted uranium. During his term as President of ENEA he developed a novel method for concentrating solar power at high temperatures for energy production, known as the Archimedes Project, which is presently being developed by industry for commercial use. He is currently pursuing his solar programmes at CIEMAT in Spain.
Jean-Marie Tarascon
Professor, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France
Jean-Marie Tarascon is a professor at the Universite de Picardie Jules Verne, but spent most of his career in the U.S.A., first at Cornell University (1980) further to his solid state chemistry PhD at Bordeaux, and then at Bell Laboratory and Bellcore up to 1994. His scientific activities within the Laboratoire de Réactivité et Chimie des Solides are focused on the elaboration of high performance systems for the storage and conversion of energy, and are composed of three main areas: new materials, interfaces and nanochemistry.
His works concerned the electronic properties of Chevrel phases such as YbMo6S8, their dissolution leading to the first example of a transition element polymeric solution, and their ability towards intercalation or (and) deintercalation. At the end of the 80’s, he joined the Bellcore chemistry group and was involved in the numerous results obtained on high temperature cuprate superconductors; role of oxygen non-stœchiometry , of cationic substitutions, magnetism or structures modulations. At the beginning of the 90’s, Bellcore asked him to create a new group on energy storage, which was rapidly prolific with, in particular, the optimization of new organic electrolytes for high voltage electrodes thus allowing the achievement of the LiMn2O4/C Li-ion battery or the discovery of the plastic Li-ion battery (PLiONTM), which is now commercialized.
The most important results to which he contributed are the stabilization of the LiMn2O4-electrolyte interface, the design of an electrochromic system resting only on the presence of electrochemically active species in solution, the pioneering role of the LRCS in the contribution of mechanical grinding to the performances optimization of the electrode materials for Li-ion batteries and the discovery of a new reversible Li reaction mechanism in highly divided mediums.
Dr Tarascon is a member of the French Academy des Sciences.
Sergio Ulgiati
Parthenope University of Napoli, Department of Sciences for the Environment, Napoli, Italy
Sergio Ulgiati graduated in Physics 1973 at University of Rome. From 1983 he has worked at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Siena, Italy where he now is a professor of Fundamentals of Environmental Impact Assessment and Life Cycle Assessment. He has applied these evaluation methods to a large number of advanced energy conversion devices (molten carbonate fuel cells, solid oxide fuel cells, hydrogen from steam reforming and water electrolysis, coal gasification, thin film photovoltaics, wind turbines, combined cycle gas turbines), calculating efficiency and environmental impact indicators and identifying bottlenecks and efficiency drops over the whole life cycle of the product. He is an expert on Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) as well as on Zero-Emission Systems, Integration of Production Activities for decreased environmental impact. In 2003 he was a founder of the European research consortium ZERIND – Zero Emission Research and Indicators, a consortium that he now coordinates. He has been a frequent guest researcher at the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences at University of Florida. Sergio Ulgiati is a reviewer and member of several boards of international journals of environment and energy and a member of many professional societies in the fields of ecology and ecology economics.
Friedrich Wagner
Professor, Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Greifswald, Germany
Friedrich Wagner received his PhD degree in low-temperature physics from the Technical University Munich. He continued his research as post-doc at the Ohio-State University. In 1975, after the first energy crisis, he joined the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching continuing his career in the field of high temperature fusion plasmas. Wagner has worked with tokamaks and stellarators, at IPP Garching, in PPL Princeton and at IPP Greifswald. His scientific interests are magnetic confinement, plasma turbulence and self-organisation. Wagner has been Director at the IPP (recently retired) and has served as member of the IPP Directorate for many years. He was project head of the ASDEX tokamak and the stellarator experiments Wendelstein 7-AS and Wendelstein 7-X. After the reunification in Germany, he was involved in the development of a branch institute of IPP in Greifswald.
Wagner lectured at the Ruprecht-Karls University, Heidelberg, where he also received his habilitation, as Honorary Professor at the TU-Munich and as full professor at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University, Greifswald. F. Wagner is Honorary Member of the Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg, he received the APS prize for Excellency in Plasma Physics, the Hannes Alfvèn prize of the European Physical Society, the Stern-Gerlach Medal of the German Physical Society and an honorary doctor degree of the Royal-Military-Academy of Belgium. From 2007 to 2009 he was president of the European Physical Society.
Hermann-Josef Wagner
Professor, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany
Hermann Josef Wagner is Professor for Energy Systems and Energy Economics at the Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany. He holds a diploma degree and a doctorate in Energy Engineering from Technical University in Aachen, Germany. He works as a scientist for the Research Centre Juelich, for the German Parliament and for different universities. His relevant experiences are in the fields of energy systems analysis, renewable energies like wind energy and life cycle analysis. He has published more than 170 articles in international and national journals and books. He is strongly engaged in International Association of Energy Economists (IAEE) and in German Association of Energy Engineers (VDI). He also holds the membership of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and has worked as an academy consulter for three G-8 summit conferences.
Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker
Professor and Co-Chair, International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management
Ernst von Weizäcker is currently serving as Co-Chair of the International Panel on Sustainable Resource Use. He war born in 1939 in Zürich, Switzerland. After graduating in physics from the University of Hamburg, Germany in 1995 he continued studies in biology and received his Ph.D at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He joined the Protestant Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Heidelberg in 1969 and was appointed full professor of interdisciplinary biology at the University of Essen in 1972. From here he moved to the University of Kassel where he served as President from 1975 - 1980. In 1981 he was appointed Director at the UN Centre for Science and Technology for Development in New York. He returned to Europe in 1984 to serve as Director of the Institute for European Environmental Policy in Bonn, London, and Paris. In 1991 he was appointed Founding President of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, Energy, which soon developed into the largest climate policy think tank in Europe. In 1998 he was elected Member of the Bundestag (German Parliament), for the SPD from the city of Stuttgart. Here, he served as Chairman first of the Study Commission on Economic Globalisation and, from 2002-2005 of the Environment Committee. Deciding not to run for Parliament again, he accepted the appointment as Dean of the Bren School for Environmental Science and Management, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from which he retired after 3 years, end 2008.
His publications in English include Ecological Tax Reform: (1992 with Jochen Jesinghaus) 1994. Earth Politics (1994), Factor Four. Doubling Wealth — Halving Resource Use (with Amory and Hunter Lovins, 1997), and Limits to Privatization (with Oran Young and Matthias Finger, 2005). A sequel to Factor Four, called Factor Five is forthcoming in 2009 (with Charlie Hargroves and Michael Smith).
Alfred Voβ
Head of Institute for Energy Economics, Stuttgart, Germany
Alfred Voß studied after his graduation in Dortmund from 1965 to 1970 mechanical engineering at the RWTH Aachen University where he in 1973 obtained his doctorate with the thesis approaches to the overall analysis of the human system, Energy, Environment“. In 1973 he was Deputy Director of the Program Group System Research and Technological Development of the KFA nuclear research center (Kernforschungsanlage, Juelich). During 1976-77, he worked at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg. In 1977 he became director of the Program Group System Research and Technological Development of the KFA. Voß received in 1983 a call to the Department of Energy and Power Systems at the University of Stuttgart, In 1990 he was appointed director of the Institute for Energy Economics and Rational Use of Energy (IER). He was from 1991 to 1994 Member of the Enquete Commission “Protecting the Earth’s atmosphere” of the German Parliament from 2000 to 2002 and a member of the Inquiry Commission “Sustainable energy supply under the conditions of globalization and liberalization” of the German Parliament. Since 1995 he has been a member of the Senate of the Hermann von Helmholtz Community of German Research Centers. Alfred Voß is with his academic work engaged in the issue of sustainable energy technologies and energy systems He is group leader of the research initiative “Power of the 21st Century“ (KW 21) launched in 2004.