Maria Skyllas-Kazacos

Maria Skyllas-Kazacos (born 1951) is an Australian chemical engineer best known for her pioneering work of the vanadium redox battery, which she created at the University of New South Wales in the 1980s. Her design used sulfuric acid electrolytes and was patented by the university. In 1999, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia "for service to science and technology, particularly in the development of the vanadium redox battery as an alternative power source".

Early life Skyllas-Kazacos was born as Maria Skyllas in Kalymnos, Greece, in 1951 and emigrated to Australia in 1954. She is the oldest of four siblings. She attended Fort Street Girls High School in Sydney, before beginning a degree in industrial chemistry at the University of New South Wales. She graduated with first class honours and the University Medal in 1974.

She completed her PhD in 1978 at the UNSW School of Chemical Technology on the topic of the electrochemistry of molten salts.

Career After finishing her PhD, Skyllas-Kazacos received a CSIRO Postdoctoral Fellowship and joined Bell Laboratories in the US for her post-doctoral work. Since Bell labs had to service Bell Telephone Company, Skyllas-Kazacos also did work on batteries. Skyllas-Kazacos with her research team then patented the vanadium redox battery in 1986. Whiffen Medal, Institution of Chemical Engineers Australia, 1997 CHEMECA Medal, Institution of Chemical Engineers Australia, 1998 Member of the Order of Australia, Australia Day Honours List, 1999 R.K. Murphy Medal, Royal Australian Chemical Institute, 2000 Recipient, Distinguished Lecturer Award, Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, Richland, US, 2009 Co-Recipient, Light Metals Division Journal of Metals Best Paper Award, 2009 Invested as Grand Lady of the Byzantine Order of St Eugene of Trebizond, Australia Day, 2009 Castner Medal, Society for the Chemical Industry, UK, 2011 Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, 2014