ACE-FUELS has entered into a strategic tripartite partnership with the CREST Group at University of Cambridge and the Marken Group at University of Bath. This partnership is a positive outcome of the recent visit of the ACE-FUELS Centre Leader, Prof. Oguzie, to some UK universities, including Bath and Cambridge.
The CREST group led by Prof. Adrian Fisher is multilocational, based in Cambridge, at the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) in Singapore as part of the Cambridge CARES activity and at the Cambridge University Virtual laboratory, located in the International Centre for Soft Matter, Beijing. The group’s research activities are focused on sustainable reaction engineering, bioengineering and clean energy production and numerical simulation of chemical and electrolysis reactions. The Marken group, based at the University of Bath, is led by Prof. Frank Marken and has research focus on water, solar energy, and sensing, including development of novel electrochemical technologies (linked to the Bath Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies, CSCT). The group organizes the Bath Electrochemistry Winter School and the Bath Electrochemical Impedance Summer School held annually at the University of Bath campus.
This tripartite partnership is intended to provide a ready framework to promote adoption of Electrochemical Science and Technology in Sub Saharan Africa, through an initiative tagged ‘’Electrochemical Technologies for Africa’s Sustainable Economic Development’’ (ETASED). The ETASED programme shall comprise a series of workshops and hands-on training sessions on electrochemical techniques and applications, targeting researchers, industry personnel and graduate students within the sub region. There is no doubt that Electrochemical Science and Technology has capacity to institute and nurture multidisciplinary research initiatives. Unfortunately, the area has yet to receive the deserved attention and interest amongst researchers in Nigeria and indeed Sub-Saharan Africa. Consequently, the immense accruable benefits remain untapped and unexplored. ETASED shall build upon and expand the ACE-FUELS “Future of Electrochemistry in Modern Africa” workshop series, as well as facilitate actualization of the Pan African Electrochemistry Network, conceived initially in 2016 by scientists from Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt and the UK, with the aim of popularizing the applications and benefits of electrochemical science in Africa.
