Dr. Shahab Rohani received his Bachelor's degree from the Power and Water University of Technology in Tehran (2011) and his master's degree from the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (2015). His study specialization was in Renewable Energies and Power Plant Technologies. His master's thesis was related to the modeling and simulation of CSP plants and was carried out at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE. After finishing his studies, he continued to work as a PhD student at Fraunhofer ISE in the field of Modelling, Simulation, and optimization of CSP Plants. He is a part of the research group Solar Thermal Power Plants and High-Temperature Storage. He is part of the development team of the in-house simulation software ColSimCSP and uses this tool primarily for the assessment of CSP technologies and the optimization of design and operation strategies for cost reduction. The scope of his PhD project is to find solutions for reducing the water footprint of CSP plants without increasing the cost of electricity.
Prof. Dr. Derek Baker is a Full Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU). He is the Lead Researcher in the Concentrating Solar Thermal (CST) Division "ODAK" that is part of ODTU-The Center for Solar Energy Research and Applications (ODTU-GUNAM). He received his BS from Virginia Tech in 1992 and his MS and PhD from The University of Texas-Austin in 1996 and 2000, respectively, all in Mechanical Engineering. Currently, he is coordinating the EU Horizon Europe (HE) SolarHub project and leading ODTU-GUNAM's contributions to the EU HE CST4ALL project. Previously, he coordinated the EU Horizon 2020 SolarTwins project. He is currently / has previously contributed to the following EU projects: SOLARIZE, GeoSmart, SFERA-III, HORIZON-STE, INSHIP, and EU-SOLARIS. He regularly serves as an independent expert for the evaluation of EU research proposals. He was twice named METU Educator of the Year (2003–4 and 2005–6), and in 2013 was named METU Outstanding Educator, which is METU's highest and terminal teaching award.
