Amin Gharghi
For as long as I can remember, I have been walking into rooms and asking the same question: does this really need that much energy?
I asked it first on construction sites. For more than ten years I worked as a technical manager in the HVAC industry and on solar power plants of 1, 5 and 10 MW, coordinating design, installation and maintenance teams. But I was never satisfied with simply making a system work; I wanted it to work with less. So I kept pushing solutions that store instead of spend: phase change materials, designs that borrow from the seasons rather than fight them, and wherever the site allowed it, a path towards zero energy.
That habit of asking eventually turned into inventing. Three of my inventions became registered patents, developed through collaboration between academia and industry, and supported by national investment, one of them selected as a nationally recognised project.
In parallel, and just as importantly to me, I have spent over a decade in the classroom as an academic lecturer and teaching assistant, and I have mentored more than thirty research projects and patents. I also designed and ran academic competitions built around mechanical engineering concepts, because I have always believed that a concept a student competes with is a concept they never forget.
Today the question has followed me to IN+. My work is about the energy transition, how different societies and different applications can move to renewable energy, and how we make that move easier rather than heavier. Here at IN+ I focus on designing more efficient processes for hydrogen production, studying the interfacial forces and the behaviour of bubbles that quietly decide how much of our energy is actually converted, and how much is lost.
Efficiency is not one of my research topics. It is the topic, the one I keep returning to, in industry, in teaching and in the laboratory. And I am convinced that only the combination of knowledge and innovation can carry us to that mission.
