Maria Skyllas-Kazacos is an internationally acclaimed researcher in the area of energy storage, at the University of New South Wales. Her pioneering work on the Vanadium Redox Battery is already having a major impact on the electricity sector and renewable energy industry world-wide. The technology that she pioneered is internationally regarded as the foremost battery technology for large-scale energy-storage applications. It is being used to remove inherent instability problems of wind and solar energy (via load balancing), allowing large-scale penetration of renewables into the ?smart grid? of the future. It is now being manufactured by several companies in Europe, USA, Japan and China.