Program » Invited Speakers

THERMOELECTRIC APPLICATIONS
Jonathan Siviter
TE Conversion Systems Ltd, UK

Jonathan co-founded TCS in 2015 and leads the business development and marketing activities. He is a Chartered Engineer with the IET. He has a strong background in industry having worked across automotive and heavy engineering focused companies. Jonathan obtained a M.Eng in Electronics Engineering in 2010 and a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2015 both from the University of Glasgow. His PhD work focused on the development of a thermoelectric heat pump applied to the Rankine Cycle.

Raphael St-Gelais
University of Ottawa, CANADA

Prof. Raphael St-Gelais joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Ottawa as an Assistant Professor in 2018. He obtained his PhD from Polytechnique Montreal (Engineering Physics) in 2012 for his work on MEMS-tunable optical components and on-chip optical sensors. From 2013 to 2016, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell and Columbia Universities, where he pioneered the development of nanosystems for controlling and harvesting thermal radiation at the nanoscale. His work led to landmark original demonstration of near-field radiative heat transfer and thermophotovoltaic energy conversion in fully integrated platforms, and was notably published in Nano Letters (2014), Nature Nanotechnology (2016), and Nature Communications (2020). From 2016 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral researcher with Sankey lab at McGill University, where he studied coupling of mechanical and thermal radiative forces in low loss mechanical resonators. He was awarded the Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship in 2009 for his Ph.D. work at Polytechnique Montreal, as well as postdoctoral fellowships from FRQNT and NSERC for his work at Cornell & Columbia. At uOttawa, he is the director of the Micro and Nano Systems laboratory, which studies the interplay of optical, mechanical and thermal phenomena in micro and nano devices, with a strong focus on energy conversion and on breaking the traditional limitations of high precision sensors.

DEVELOPMENT OF CERAMIC ELECTRETS FOR VIBRATIONAL POWER GENERATOR
Yumi Tanaka
Tokyo University of Science, JAPAN

Yumi Tanaka was born in Shizuoka, Japan, in 1974. She received the Ph.D. (in engineering) degrees from the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, in 2003. In 2003, she joined Asahi Kasei Co., Ltd and worked there until 2004, involving in capacitor development. After engaged in research on iron silicide based-thin film solar cell in Tokyo Institute of Technology (post-doctoral researcher, 2004-2006), bio-electrets in Tokyo Medical and Dental University (assistant prof., 2006-2010) and ceramic materials for energy conversion devices in Kyushu University (associate prof., 2010-2013), she has been progressing research on the development of ceramic dielectrics.