Dr. Irina Harun is currently a Senior Lecturer with the Department of Environment, Universiti Putra Malaysia. She has been involved in hydrogen research since her undergraduate years where she produced biohydrogen using bacteria isolated from termites. Her next project utilises the same H2-producing consortia to treat agricultural waste. During her Ph.D. studies at Imperial College London (ICL), supervised by Prof Klaus Hellgardt, she worked with engineered strains of microalgae, producing high-value terpenoids and lipids, highly relevant in the energy, pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry. She has been affiliated with the Energy Futures Lab and the Chemical Engineering Department of Imperial College and was involved with an EU Horizons 2020 project PHOTOFUEL, a €6 million project which focused on the biocatalytic production of solar fuels. This project involved various academic and industrial members such as Volkswagen, Neste, Bielefeld University, Uppsala University, Universita Firenze, A4F, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Volvo. Her training in ICL cultivated a demands-based approach to her research while maintaining an open-door strategy towards networking. Within Malaysia, her network includes previous work and research associations with TNB Research, UKM-YSD (Yayasan Sime Darby), NanoMalaysia and NuclearMalaysia, organisations highly relevant in the energy and renewables sector in the country.