The Battery Safety Conference 2025

Annika Ahlberg Tidblad works as Technical Leader Battery Safety and Legislation at Volvo Cars and is also Associate Professor in Inorganic Chemistry at the Ångström Advanced Battery Center at Uppsala University, where she holds a part time position as lecturer. Annika is a leading industry experts on multiple international legislation activities regarding electric vehicles and battery technology, including the EU Battery Regulation and the UN ECE Electric Vehicle Regulation on electric vehicle safety and environmental performance requirements. Annika is also an active technical expert in several national and international standards working groups for ISO and IEC for electric vehicle batteries.

Dr. Judy Jeevarajan is Vice President and Executive Director for the Electrochemical Safety Research Institute at UL Research Institutes. With more than 28 years of experience in the area of batteries and a primary focus on lithium-ion, she specializes in battery safety research, including safety of aged lithium-ion cells and modules, thermal runaway and its propagation, characterizing fire, smoke and particulate emissions as well as fire suppressants for lithium-ion batteries, recycling lithium-ion batteries and consumer battery safety. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry (Electrochemistry) from University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa (1995) and M.S. in Chemistry from University of Notre Dame (1991).

Dr. Frederic Schuh holds a Doctor of Engineering degree from RWTH Aachen University. He has dedicated over seven years of his professional life to product engineering of battery electric vehicles at Daimler Truck AG, concentrating on HV batteries.

Being component-responsible for a series commercial vehicle battery cell for three years, he has contributed to advancements in the field of battery cell technology.

His current role as executive assistant to the head of product engineering battery and fuel cell systems at Daimler Truck AG comes with responsibility for a spectrum of tasks across the entire R&D process of battery and fuel cell systems.

Tom Hessels MSc. works as an advisor and project manager at the Netherlands Institute for Public Safety (NIPV). His work focusses on battery safety, particularly on fires in electric vehicles, its corresponding extinguishing strategies and the safety aspects of energy storage systems.

Elna Heimdal Nilsson has an educational background in chemistry and has performed extensive research on combustion chemistry of biofuels, before broadening her research interest towards Li-ion battery safety. At the technical faculty, Lund University, Elna is leading activities related to battery thermal runaway and fires, in a constellation that includes experimentalists and modelers. Elna is also the Lund University representative in the coordinator group of the Compel research initiative on the battery value chain, which also includes Chalmers and Uppsala University. 

Martin Svensson MSc. is a battery systems architect within Epiroc Electrification Solutions. During the last seven years, Martin has played a leading role in developing Epiroc’s battery platform. His focus areas have been function development, system verification and machine integration for the battery control system. 

Dr. Kenneth Ekman have years of experience in leading and building strategies and product families in start-ups and SME’s in a quickly developing market environment. A skillful leader with excellent influencing and presentation skills. Passionate about self-development and continuous learning and has a strong understanding of circular economy business models and opportunities.

Roeland Bisschop is the Head of Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) Product Development at Volvo Energy, where he spearheads initiatives focused on developing safe and sustainable energy solutions. His expertise encompasses the entire development cycle of BESS, including hardware and software development, verification and validation processes, regulatory compliance, and safety-critical testing to mitigate hazardous events. 

With a robust background in mechanical engineering, Roeland brings over seven years of specialized experience in battery fire safety to his role. Before joining Volvo Energy, he worked at RISE, where he was actively involved in testing, incident investigations, research, and training sessions related to battery safety.

Ingvar Karlson has worked with battery-related projects at RISE for almost 15 years and has good knowledge of performance- and abuse testing. Ingvar is also one of the specialists at RISE regarding battery test standards, and he performs education about battery safety and battery fire safety.

Ola Willstrand is a research scientist in the Department of Fire and Safety at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden. He is focusing on battery safety and has a lot of experience from laboratory fire tests, from small-scale to full-scale. He holds a Master of Science degree in Engineering Physics from Lund University and a Licentiate degree in Material Chemistry from Uppsala University.

Ellen Scott obtained her master’s degree in applied physics from Chalmers University of Technology in 2018. During her master's studies, she specialized in materials physics, specifically energy-related materials such as batteries, fuel cells, semiconductors and photovoltaics. 

Ellen has been working as a researcher at RISE since 2021, focusing her research on ageing mechanisms and state estimation algorithms for Li-ion batteries. She is also working with safety and durability of Li-ion batteries, including light abuse testing and monitoring of near-failure events and early detection of thermal runaway. Prior to her research career, Ellen has experience in the industry working with BMS SW development, both for automotive applications and consumer products.