News

Emily recently received the prestigious Kramer Award for her oral presentation at MROP 2022 and Howie received the best poster prize at the Spring BASF California Research Alliance Review. Keeping the group proud, congrats!

Our undergraduate researcher Allyson gave a talk on how to land internships in the battery industry. She has previously interned at Tesla and Panasonic Energy. This summer, she'll be working at QuantumScape! Allyson hopes to continue helping her college peers get industry opportunities.

The NSF has selected Professor Raphaële Clément as one of this year's CAREER Award recipients. This is one of the most prestigious awards given to junior faculty nationwide for exemplifying the role of teacher-scholars through research and education. Congratulations to Prof. Clément!

The Current's feature on this achievement: https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2022/020522/sodium-solution

Congratulations to Emily for bagging the Silver Medal Student Presentation award at the 1st Energy & Informatics International Forum for her talk on sodium metal fluorides!

Read more about the forum or award here: https://www.infosyenergy.titech.ac.jp/Academy/intl_forum2021/award.html

Our very own Professor Clément gave an ECS webinar titled “From order to disorder: NMR insights into ionic conduction in battery materials" on October 27. A recording of this talk is available online at https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/3111169723844313101. Once you register, the video will start automatically. The replay is also available on the Physics World webinar page.

Euan Bassey, a PhD student from the Grey group in Cambridge, visited UCSB for a couple weeks to carry out operando EPR measurements on his cathode materials with Howie Nguyen.

This past week, our undergraduate researcher Wen Jin presented her poster at UCSB's undergraduate research symposium. She was mentored by our very own Emily Foley under MRL's FLAM, a summer research program. This fall, as Wen goes into her sophomore year as a chemical engineering major, she will continue to conduct research with the Clément group. Congratulations Wen!

This past summer, Allyson our undergraduate researcher interned at Gigafactory Nevada. She worked with Panasonic Energy of North America's materials engineering team as they produced cells for Tesla Model 3's. Congratulations on completing your internship, Allyson!

This year, Allyson founded a summer research program called Climatry. Its mission was to provide graduate student mentors for Philippine Science High School students who are required to do scientific research. Through Climatry, these students come up with a research proposal related to climate change over the summer.

Ashley and Emily were selected to be mentors for Climatry. Both received phenomenal reviews from their mentees whom they guided through their research proposals thoroughly. We are proud of these three scientists for their hard work in giving back!

Have you ever wondered why batteries catch fire ? Elias explains the phenomenon of thermal runaway, i.e., uncontrolled battery heating in batteries with a nail penetration test.

Videos of this demonstration and where Elias tells us about his journey to grad school can be found here. This is an outreach initiative in partnership with Mrs. Daniella Duran, a chemistry teacher at Valencia High School.