Associate Professor Geoffrey Will | UniSC | University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia

Associate Professor Geoffrey Will completed his BSc and PhD in Chemistry at the University College Dublin in Ireland. He has worked at Queensland University of Technology for 23 years and in 2023 taken a position at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He initially started his career as a physical chemist investigating various solar cell technologies and materials. This included dye sensitised solar cells and thin film technologies receiving several grants and authoring numerous publications. He has spent the last 20 years researching and designing solutions for industry in corrosion and material degradation. These solutions have been employed to better understand corrosion in a variety of environments such as under insulation, atmospheric, pile wraps, military infrastructure, bridges, civil infrastructure and other areas where inspection can be difficult if not prohibited.

He has published 177+ papers in Q1 journals in the areas of materials, electrochemistry, hydrogen production, catalysis and molten salt corrosion. His group developed techniques to monitor corrosion and coating breakdown and models to predict corrosion behaviour. In collaboration with other groups these corrosion models using data analytics have provided support for various asset management decisions and in doing so determine the most cost-effective maintenance for defence and civil infrastructure. In the last 10 years an effort supported by the Australian government through ARENA has seen his work in high temperature solar thermal applications is of note. Solar thermal power plants have environments such as molten sodium, super critical carbon dioxide and molten salts at temperatures greater than 800°C and presenting a challenging research area. This area however has a very real contribution to the future renewable energy production. He provides expert witness and industry presentations in these areas.

Assoc. Prof. Geoffrey Will has been a member of the Australasian Corrosion Association (ACA) for over 22 years serving on state and national committees as national education director and state president. He has convened international conferences and is associate editor for several journals (Corrosion Materials, Corrosion and Material Degradation, and Materials).