Our Electrochemical Storage research lead, Dr Jenny Baker won Swansea University’s Research and Innovation award for Early Career: Rising Star.
The Research & Innovation Awards celebrate the outstanding research and collaborations that are undertaken at Swansea University, and the enormous impact these are having across the world. The ceremony guests included high profile individuals from higher education, industry and government.
The Early Career: Rising Star award recognises research staff who have a great impact on Swansea University, the UK and the world. This year, the award went to a very well deserving Dr Jenny Baker.
Jenny initially joined the photovoltaic (PV) team at SPECIFIC researching solar cells in line with SPECIFIC’s vision – a world in which buildings can generate, store and release their own heat and electricity from solar energy. Jenny’s career rapidly progressed, supervising students, speaking at conferences, publishing papers and leading on projects that have gained UK-wide press coverage, such as the manufacture of the largest perovskite PV module.
In January 2019, Jenny was promoted to Senior Technology Transfer Fellow, moving into the field of battery storage research, a key part of the energy problem of how to sustainably store solar energy harvested from the sun. She also received a £1.3M, 5-year Early Career Research Fellowship by EPSRC to continue with her research. As battery team lead, Jenny has been busy recruiting a team of researchers to aide her in this endeavour. In addition to this she has been appointed the Swansea University lead in M-RHEX, a collaborative battery project involving internationally-leading researchers on world-class materials research.
Jenny has received funding to support and run women’s outreach events such as the first Welsh Soapbox Science, and she regularly runs outreach activities at science fairs and schools to encourage children into engineering and is a member of the Women’s Engineering Society. She is also the creator of Welshwomenwiki, training people to contribute to Wikipedia, promoting inspirational Welsh women and reducing the current gender bias on Wikipedia.
Jenny’s passion and drive is inspiring for those around her. She is a great advocate for sustainability research and for helping to inspire more women into the field of engineering. Congrats again, Jenny!
