Professor Ken Baldwin was the inaugural Director of the ANU Energy Change Institute (now the ANU Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions) and founding Director of the ANU Grand Challenge: Zero-Carbon Energy for the Asia-Pacific. His main focus is to help drive the energy transition, particularly for Australia’s future export industries based on renewable energy. He is a also a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics (UK), Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America) and the Australian Institute of Physics, and winner of the 2004 Eureka Prize for initiating Science meets Parliament.

"For eminent research contributions to the field of Physics, including his pioneering work to create new ultraviolet light sources that have resulted in important contributions to fundamental atomic physics. And for international leadership in accelerating the global energy transition through the founding and running of interdisciplinary initiatives, including the ANU Energy Change Institute (ECI), which bring together industry, government and academia to address the global challenge of climate change.