News

Our PhD students, Eliana and Hanna, represented the group and presented their work at the third annual Southern California Electrochemistry Conference for Students this week, hosted by the ECS student chapter at UC Irvine. Congratulations to Hanna for receiving the award for Best Talk at the conference!!

Erick Lawrence, a second-year PhD student in the group, was recently awarded the highly competitive NDSEG Fellowship. This prestigious honor recognizes his outstanding potential in STEM research and will support his research of disordered rock salt cathode materials. Congratulations Erick!!

Emma, Tyler, Leo, and Amit represented our lab at the 2025 Experimental Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Conference this week, where they presented their work, learned more about recent developments in the field, and connected with other NMR experts. A special highlight was the social event at the Monterey Aquarium — a memorable evening in an impressive venue!

Our students Erick, Magdalena, Cody, and Tyler had a great time presenting their work and meeting colleagues in the field at the 2025 Gordon Research Conference and Seminar for Nanomaterials for Applications in Energy Technology. Thank you to the organizers for putting together a wonderful experience!

Tyler received the best poster prize at the International Battery Association (IBA) meeting 2024, and more recently at the Materials Research Outreach Program (MROP) at UCSB for his and Elias's work on understanding chemical reactivity in dual electrolyte solid-state batteries. Clearly, this work is not going unnoticed! Congratulations, Tyler!

We all had a blast bowling together at our end-of-year social! It was a great way to wrap up the year with the team, but it was bittersweet as we said goodbye to our amazing postdoc Euan, who’s off to start a new position at CRMN Lyon—good luck in your next chapter!

Congratulations to Erick on his award for giving one of the best poster presentations during the 6th US Total Scattering School at Oak Ridge National Laboratory! His poster was about how total scattering techniques can be used to characterize short-range ordering in disordered rock-salt (DRX) cathodes and how it changes as a function of cycling and doping.

Congratulations to Raphaële on receiving the 2024 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award from The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation! These awards are given to early career faculty who have "created an outstanding independent body of scholarship, and are deeply committed to education." The accompanying $100,000 grant will support our group in our investigation of solid-state lithium-sulfur batteries.

Very proud of Tyler Pennebaker, a 2nd year PhD student in the group, who received the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Tyler uses NMR spectroscopy to study solid electrolytes and solid-state batteries in an effort to develop devices that are safer and more energy-dense than the current lithium-ion technology.  Congrats, Tyler!

Many congratulations to Dr. Gonzalez-Correa on successfully defending his PhD! Elio's research has investigated the intercalation mechanics of Na-based Super Ionic Conductor (NASICON) materials for use in next-generation batteries. We'll miss him but wish him well as he transitions to work in the battery industry.