Francesco Polito

Francesco Polito is a renewable energy engineer with extensive experience in the development of PV, wind and battery energy storage systems projects across different countries. He earned his BSc in Chemical Engineering from Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II and subsequently joined Imperial College London where he received an MSc in Chemical Engineering and is currently undertaking his PhD.

Francesco’s research interests are in solar solutions aimed at meeting the diverse and evolving needs of modern society, beyond solely electricity, through the power of the Sun. Over the past five years, Francesco has worked as an engineering manager leading renewable energy projects across the UK, Italy, and the US, spanning photovoltaics (PV), wind, and battery systems (BESS). This industry experience exposed him to the real-world challenges slowing the energy transition, fueling his determination to bridge the gap between research and practice.

Christos Markides

Professor Christos Markides is a major shareholder of Solar Flow and inventor of the award-winning patented Solar Flow technology. He completed a PhD in Energy Technologies at the Department of Engineering of the University of Cambridge in 2005. He was appointed Lecturer at Imperial College London in late 2008 and became Professor in 2018.

Christos is now Head of the Clean Energy Processes (CEP) Laboratory at Imperial, numbering 40+ members and whose research activities focus on renewable and high-efficiency energy technologies and systems, in particular through the understanding and development of new processes and methods for cooling, heating and power, and a particular on solar energy. The CEP’s activities has been supported by £30M+ of research grant funding. He has written 400+ scientific papers that have been either presented at important international conferences or published in leading academic journals.

Gan Huang

Dr. Gan Huang is currently the head of Hybrid Solar Technologies (HST) laboratory and serves as the Principal Investigator of the Helmholtz Investigator Group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. Dr. Huang earned his PhD from Tsinghua University in 2018. After completing his doctoral studies, he joined the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford in 2018 as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Subsequently, he served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Clean Energy Processes (CEP) Laboratory within the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London from 2019 to 2021. He spent time and gained research experience at the University of Pittsburgh in the USA, and also has engineering experience that he gained while working for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan.

Dr Huang’s expertise focuses on next-generation solar technologies as well as advanced cooling technologies for ultra-high heat flux surfaces, including additive-manufactured micro-cooling structures and biomimetic transpiration cooling technologies. His research has been featured in the world’s leading physics magazine ‘Physics World’ in UK and ‘Advances in Engineering’ in Canada.