Keynote Speakers

Prof. Fariborz HAGHIGHAT

Concordia University, Canada

Editor-in-chief of Sustainable Cities and Society

Dr. Fariborz Haghighat is a professor at the Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering – Concordia University, Canada. His research aims to achieve sustainability in the built environment. His current research focuses on the fundamental of heat and mass transport in the built environment, and on its applications in the design and analysis of energy-efficient, healthy/immune, and sustainable buildings/communities. He has published several book chapters and over 400 journal and conference papers. Dr. Haghighat is the co-founder of the International Conference on Indoor Air Quality, Ventilation and Energy Conservation in Buildings (1992), one of the most prominent international conferences in this field. A Fellow of American Society of heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioing Engineers (ASHRAE) and of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality (ISIAQ), and Concordia Research Chair in Energy and Environment; in 2019, he was conferred an honourable member of the Society of Heating, Air Conditioning and Sanitary Engineers of Japan (SAHAE). Dr. Haghighat is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Sustainable Cities and Society, Co-Editor of the International Journal Energy and Built Environment, and editorial board member for numerous journals. He led two international research projects sponsored by the International Energy Agency on the topic of Energy Storage, “Applying Energy Storage in Buildings of the Future, ECES Annex 23” and “Integration of Energy storage with energy efficient buildings and districts: Optimization and Automation”, ECES Annex 31.

Prof. Di Yun
Xi'an Jiaotong University, China

Outstanding scholar in the ‘Youth Talent Plan’

Director of ‘Key R&D Project Issues’ for the Ministry of Science and Technology

Dr. Di Yun is a professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Technology of Xi'an Jiaotong University. He is an outstanding scholar in the ‘Youth Talent Plan’ and served as the director of ‘Key R&D Project Issues’ for the Ministry of Science and Technology. Professor Yun received his PhD in Nuclear Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010. He worked at Argonne National Laboratory as a nuclear engineer in the Nuclear Engineering Division from 2010 to 2015. He joined Xi'an Jiaotong University in 2015.

Professor Yun focuses on developing advanced nuclear fuel materials. On the theoretical front, he explored a novel approach, multi-atom nucleation, to describe gas bubble nucleation process in metallic nuclear fuel materials; he also investigated in fundamental aspects of nuclear fuel performance modeling and applied multi-scale simulation methods to address fuel performance issues. On the experimental front, he is developing nitride coatings for advanced nuclear fuel systems for light water reactors and has received technological awards in this area; he is currently pushing for development of such materials into real engineering application scenarios.

Mr. Santiago Bañales López

Managing Director, Iberdrola Innovation Middle East, Qatar 

Santiago Bañales is Managing Director of Iberdrola Innovation Middle East (ME), Iberdrola’s global development center of digital solutions for the energy industry, since 2016.

He has 25 years of energy industry experience fulfilling executive roles in R&D, Engineering, Product Development, Management Consulting, M&A and General Management. During the development of his career he has experienced a wide breadth of business environments in an international setting, being part of or doing business with state-owned (Electricité de France) and private utilities (Endesa, Iberdrola), management consulting firms (Kearney), private equities and family-owned manufacturing businesses (Ormazabal). Previous to his current role Santiago was CEO of Ormazabal Current, a global smart grids product manufacturing with facilities in US, Switzerland and Spain.

Santiago holds a Master of Science in Technology and Policy form the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT – (Fulbright Fellow) and a Dual Engineering Degree from Ecole Centrale Paris and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. He is a published author and has been involved in graduate and executive education for more than 15 years.

He is also an INSEAD-certified International Board Director, having held executive and non-executive Board Directorships positions in several energy industry associations, startups and universities.

Invited Speakers

Prof. Hao-Chun Zhang

Harbin University of Technology, China

Prof. Haochun Zhang is currently a professor of Harbin University of Technology and director of the Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology. His research field covers modern thermodynamics, renewable energy, nuclear reactor multi physical field coupling, space nuclear power, innovate thermal control of spacecraft and photoelectric characteristics. He has lead more than 30 national level projects, including: major NSFC programs, special topics of major national science and technology, and sub topics of national key research and development projects, as well as other key cooperation projects. He participated in planning and writing 6 English monographs, published more than 200 academic papers, cited more than 700 times, and 2 papers were selected as high cited papers of ESI. 8 national invention patents and 15 software copyrights were authorized. He was invited to give more than 20 lectures at various academic conferences. He was also awarded the German Krupp Foundation Scholarship for Chinese Young Scholars and the first prize of Heilongjiang Higher Education Teaching Achievement Award. He served as the associate editor/editorial board member of 8 international and domestic journals such as Entropy, and specially invited reviewers of more than 50 international academic journals such as Applied Energy.

Assoc. Prof. Ce Shang

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

Ce Shang received his B.E. from Zhejiang University in 2011 and Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore in 2016. He joined Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2017 as an assistant professor, where he is now an associate professor. His research interests include the operational planning and reliability evaluation of power and energy systems, using tools of operations research and machine learning.