Joey Ocon visited RLI as a researcher from November 2016 until January 2017 in the Off-Grid Systems field. His research stay was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the UP-DOST ERDT Fellowship of the Philippines.

Joey is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of the Philippines Diliman. He heads the Laboratory of Electrochemical Engineering, a research laboratory he co-founded in 2014 to work on the development of novel and efficient electrode materials and processes in electrochemical technologies for energy and environmental applications. He currently leads several government- and privately-funded research projects and mentors five PhD, twenty-one MS, and two undergraduate students in the Chemical Engineering and Energy Engineering programs of the university. From 2011-2015, Joey studied at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea under Prof. Dr. Jaeyoung Lee of the Ertl Center for Electrochemistry and Catalysis, where he worked on the development of novel semiconductor-air batteries. Aside from his work on batteries, he was also involved in studies for the conversion of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide to more valuable chemicals and in the development of novel non-noble metal-based catalysts for fuel cells and water electrolyzers.

In 2015, Joey was awarded by the National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) of the Philippines as an Outstanding Young Scientist in the field of Chemical Engineering and also by BMBF as a Green Talents Awardee for excellent young scientists in sustainability research, particularly on this work on energy storage. He represented the Philippines in the 2015 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany. Joey has a Google Scholar h-index of 9 and has published at least thirty international peer-reviewed articles in leading international journals on electrochemical energy storage technologies, green chemistry, and environmental electrochemistry.

While at RLI, Joey worked with the Off-Grid Systems Group in quantifying the market potential of the transformation of the diesel-operated island grids in the Philippines into renewable energy-based hybrid energy systems. Growing up in the Southern Philippines and having been exposed to life in rural areas, he believes that access to affordable clean energy is key to rural economic development, and more specifically to improving the quality of life.