View the recording and slides: Future Energy Forum

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About this event

The Future Energy Forum, jointly delivered by the Melbourne Energy Institute (MEI) and the University of Melbourne Industry Partnerships team, brought together senior leaders spanning industry, government, research, technology, investment, and the energy sector.

This Forum focused on emerging technical and commercial advances in fusion energy, exploring the role that fusion could play within Australia’s evolving energy mix as the nation accelerates its transition to net‑zero. With the global fusion sector moving rapidly, from alternative confinement concepts to private‑sector commercialisation attempts, the Forum offered a strategic opportunity to evaluate technological readiness, deployment pathways, the rationale for patient capital investment, regulatory implications, and system-level integration questions relevant to Australia.

A core component of the event examined social licence considerations for nuclear‑related technologies, recognising the unique socio‑political environment in Australia. While fusion differs fundamentally from fission in safety profile, waste, fuel cycles, and proliferation risks, the public often conflates the two, making community acceptance, trust-building, and policy clarity essential prerequisites for any future deployment. The Forum explored how Australia can frame nuclear‑adjacent technologies responsibly and transparently.

Together, these discussions positioned the Forum as a platform for exploring how advanced energy technologies, particularly fusion, could contribute to Australia’s long-term energy security, decarbonisation goals, and industrial competitiveness, while ensuring they are developed with clear public values and community expectations in mind.

Speakers

Dr Warren McKenzie

Managing Director
HB11 Energy
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Managing Director of HB11 Energy, Warren McKenzie, PhD (Materials Science / Nanotechnology) is a science entrepreneur, materials scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales. He has held two post-doctorate research positions, at Trinity College in Dublin and at the University of NSW.

Matt Bungey

Director 
Type One Energy Australia
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Matt Bungey is part of the Type One Energy team leading efforts to progress fusion energy with governments, customers and investors across Australia and Southeast Asia. He has extensive experience in the commercialisation of deep tech, having worked as an investor and Director with start-ups in diverse industries such as energy, water, agriculture, construction, carbon dioxide removal, defence and cyber. In this work, he has supported Founders across the US, UK, Israel, Australia and Asia. He is a fervent believer in the potential of fusion energy to offer Australia both sovereign energy abundance and a tremendous economic opportunity to build a new supply chain across our region.

Matt is a Chemical Engineer who spent 15 years as an Investment Banker in London and has significant M&A and financing experience. He is an experienced Director of both listed and private businesses. As Chief Investment Officer and Co-Founder of Foxglove Capital, Matt has led over 40 early-stage investments made globally.

Dr Sam Sicilia

Chief Investment Officer
Hostplus
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Sam Sicilia was appointed as inaugural Chief Investment Officer at Hostplus in March 2008 after a storied career in academia and the finance industry that stretches back to the early 1990s. Hostplus is one of Australia’s largest superannuation funds with c$150 billion in funds under management, 330,000 contributing employers and 1.9 million members. Hostplus has c350 employees across all Australian States and Territories dedicated to helping members understand and grow their superannuation, so they can retire with dignity. Sam has a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from Monash University, a Ph.D. in mathematical modelling from Monash University, and a Master of Applied Finance from the University of Melbourne.

Professor Maria Rost Rublee

Professor, International Relations
University of Melbourne
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Maria Rost Rublee is Professor of International Relations at the University of Melbourne. She has extensive academic and professional experience in the field of nuclear politics, including nuclear security culture, nuclear stewardship and social licence. Her internationally recognised research includes an award-winning monograph, two edited books, and over 40 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Her work has been funded by over $2.5 million in competitive grants from U.S. Institute of Peace, NATO, the governments of Norway, Canada and Australia, the Japan Foundation, among others. Her contributions have been recognised through the 2025 Academic Leadership Award from the Australian Political Science Association and her selection to the 2022 Top 50 Leadership List, U.S. National Security and Foreign Affairs by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC. Her Ph.D. is from George Washington University.

Host

Professor Richard Sandberg

Director, Melbourne Energy Institute
University of Melbourne
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Richard Sandberg is the Melbourne Energy Institute’s Interim Director. Professor Sandberg is also Chair Professor of Computational Mechanics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Melbourne. His main interest is in high-fidelity simulation of turbulent flows in turbomachinery and aerospace applications in order to gain physical understanding of flow and noise mechanisms. He also uses the data to help assess and improve low-order models that can be employed in an industrial context, in particular by pursuing novel machine-learning approaches. He received his PhD in 2004 in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Arizona and prior to joining the University of Melbourne, he was a Professor of Fluid Dynamics and Aeroacoustics in the Aerodynamics and Flight Mechanics research group at the University of Southampton and headed the UK Turbulence Consortium (www.turbulence.ac.uk). He was awarded a veski innovation fellowship entitled: "Impacting Industry by enabling a step-change in simulation fidelity for flow and noise problems", was granted an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship for 2020-2024, and was elected Fellow of the Australasian Fluid Mechanics Society in 2024.

Moderator

Professor Martin Sevior

Professor, School of Physics
University of Melbourne
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Martin Sevior is an Honorary Professor in the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on Experimental Particle Physics and Quantum Computing. He conducts experiments with the world's highest-intensity particle accelerator, the SuperKEKB facility in Japan. This is employed to investigate matter-antimatter asymmetries in subatomic particle interactions and aims to identify fundamental new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. More recently, he has established expertise in Quantum Computing and has undertaken research in Quantum Machine Learning, Quantum Error Correction, simulations of Quantum Computers, and noise in Quantum Computing systems.

He has a long-standing interest in the Energy Transition, having established a group to study the technical and economic issues of Nuclear Fission Power in the mid-2000s and lectured undergraduates on the Physics of Energy production.

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