News

At the annual Materials Student Association Halloween coffee hour and costume contest, many of our group members donned pink as Battery Scientist Barbies!

Alden and Erick represented the Clément group this year at the Materials Department's Tony Evans 5K race.

Say hello to the newest graduate students in our group! Alden will be using ¹⁷O NMR to study redox processes in manganese oxide materials and Julia will combine NMR and magnetometry to correlate electronic structure with redox behavior in various cathode materials. We're very excited to welcome them to Santa Barbara and to see what they can discover during their research here!

This Tuesday, our group headed to the Pauley Track with members of the Seshadri group for our second joint field day. While the competition was fierce throughout games of volleyball, three-legged races, and more, the final results came out to a tie. We all enjoyed the opportunity to spend time with our colleagues outside of the battery labs and will definitely have to do this again next year!

Ash, Cody, and Emma gave talks and presented posters at this year's Southern California Users of Magnets (SCUM) Conference. Congrats to Cody on winning a poster award and thanks to UC Irvine for hosting this fun and exciting conference!

This Thursday, Dr. Garcia Ponte successfully defended her PhD! Co-advised by Professor Van der Ven, Elizabeth has worked tirelessly on modeling magnetic materials. We thank her for all of her contributions and wish her the best in her future endeavors!

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!