Joshua Spurgeon, PhD, is a Research Engineer and Theme Leader for Solar Fuels research focused on economically viable approaches to solar water splitting, electrosynthetic fuel formation, and advanced electrocatalysts.

He received his doctorate in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2010. He also holds an MS in Chemical Engineering from Caltech (2006) and a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of South Carolina (2004). He conducted research on proton exchange membrane fuels cell at the University of South Carolina (2000-2004), before pursuing research into scalable and inexpensive nanostructured photovoltaics at Caltech (2004-2009). As a post-doctoral scholar at Caltech (2010), he worked on multifunctional membranes for solar fuels applications and demonstrated the viability of solar-driven water vapor electrolysis. He then became a Research Scientist at the inception of the Department of Energy's solar fuels innovation hub, the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP, 2011-2013), where his research involved photoelectrochemical studies of the interfaces between catalysts and semiconductors. He became Project Lead for the Interface group and Proccessing, Materials, and Integration Team at JCAP (2013) before joining the Conn Center at the University of Louisville in 2014.

Josh was a National Merit Scholar and McNair Scholar at the University of South Carolina, as well as a National Science Foundation Fellow at Caltech, where he also won the Demetriades Prize in Renewable Energy and was a distinguished Everhart Lecturer. His research includes the study of novel photoelectrode materials for solar fuels generation, catalysts and strategies for controlling the selectivity in electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction, and developing novel approaches to efficient, cost-effective solar water electrolysis.