BSc (UNSW) 1974, PhD (UNSW) 1979
First woman to be professor in an Engineering School in Australia
Maria Skyllas-Kazacos enrolled at UNSW in 1970 and graduated in Industrial Chemistry with First Class Honours and the University Medal in 1974. She completed her PhD in 1978 and in 1978/79, worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, USA, on lead-acid batteries and liquid junction solar cells. She returned to UNSW as Queen Elizabeth II Fellow in 1980, before becoming the first woman academic to be appointed in a School of Chemical Engineering in Australia.
In 1983, Maria and colleague Professor Bob Robins, first discussed the concept of the All-Vanadium Flow Battery and in 1984, the first experiments were conducted with Honours student Elaine Sum to prove its technical viability. For the next 30 years Maria led a large research team at UNSW that took the vanadium battery from its initial embryonic phase, through to kW-scale laboratory prototypes and early field trials in Sydney, Thailand and Japan. In 1993, Maria became the first woman to be professor in an Engineering School in Australia.
The All-Vanadium Flow Battery is now being extensively commercialised, with several GWh of storage capacity already installed in China, Japan, Europe and North America.
Maria has received several honours and awards, including Member of the Order of Australia (1998), the Chemica Medal (1998), R.K. Murphy Medal (2000) and the Castner Medal (2011).
