Maria Skyllas-Kazacos (born 1951) is an Australian chemical engineer best known for her pioneering work of the vanadium redox battery, which she created at the University of New South Wales in the 1980s.
In 1999 she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia "for service to science and technology, particularly in the development of the vanadium redox battery as an alternative power source".
[5] She attended Fort Street Girls High School in Sydney, before beginning a degree in industrial chemistry at the University of New South Wales.
[5] After leaving Bell Labs, Skyllas-Kazacos went back to Australia and accepted a position as a Queen Elizabeth II Fellow in the School of Physics at the University of New South Wales.
She discovered that highly concentrated pentavalent solutions can be prepared indirectly from tetravalent ions, which is more soluble, combined with scraping of the carbon electrode that made the vanadium oxidation-reduction reactions reversible.