Shirley is a Chief scientist at Argonne National Laboratory Collaborative Center for Energy Storage (ACCESS) as well as a Professor at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. She is the Founding Director of Sustainable Power and Energy Center and Institute for Materials Design and Discovery at UCSD as well as a Zable Endowed Chair in Energy Technologies, UC-San Diego. She holds a Ph.D. in Advanced Materials for Micro & Nano Systems from the National University of Singapore with a Post Doc in Material Science & Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She leads the UCSD development team supporting the joint development and validation of Riot Energy’s flexible battery technology. ​

Dr. Jeffrey V. Ortega has more than 25 years of energy storage research experience and holds patents in the fields of battery and fuel cell materials, products, and systems development. He is currently working on adapting alkaline silver-zinc batteries into new flexible and bendable form factors to enable innovation in the IoT market. Prior to Riot Energy, Dr. Ortega worked at ZPower where he made numerous contributions to the understanding and improvement of silver-zinc batteries. He directed several projects to improve the performance of silver-zinc microbatteries for the hearing aid and healthcare markets. Before ZPower, Dr. Ortega developed chemical hydride storage materials and systems for fuel cells at Millennium Cell for the automotive and back-up power markets.