Maria Forsyth graduated with a PhD in Chemistry from Monash University, Australia in 1990 and received a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on lithium and sodium battery electrolytes at Northwestern University in Evanston, USA.
She returned to Australian in 1993 and shortly thereafter joined the Department of Materials Engineering at Monash University as a lecturer, being promoted to Professor in 2002. She moved to Deakin University in 2010 to start a new group as Chair in Electromaterials and Corrosion Sciences which has now grown to more than fifty researchers including young academics, research fellows and PhD students.
Maria currently holds positions as the Associate Director of the ARC Australian Centre for Electromaterials Science and Deputy Director of the Institute for Frontier Materials at Deakin University. She has served on several editorial boards and is currently senior editor for Journal of Physical Chemistry letters. She was elected to the Australian Academy of Sciences in 2015 and has received the Galileo Galilee award for her contributions to the Polymer Electrolyte and energy storage field, The Australasian Corrosion Medal for her work in the corrosion mitigation as well as an Australian Laureate Fellowship to undertake research in the area of novel energy materials.
Her research informs the broad field of materials science, particularly as it applies to energy storage and corrosion. She is a leader in the area of transport properties of materials and has had significant impact in both theoretical and applied areas. Specifically, she has focused on developing novel electromaterials for safe batteries and environmentally friendly corrosion inhibitors and on understanding the phenomenon of charge transport at metal/electrolyte interfaces and within electrolyte materials. She is passionate about clean energy, educating the next generation of scientific and technological leaders in this area and facilitating the creation of innovative technologies in Australia.
[November 2017]