Understanding fast-ion conduction in solid electrolytes

Professor Bernhard Roling is Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Marburg. He received his PhD in Physical Chemistry, followed by a postdoctoral research fellowship with Professor Malcolm Ingram at the University of Abderdeen and a position as a Research Associate at the University of Münster. Professor Roling's research interests include materials for energy storage and conversion, ion transport mechanisms in solid electrolytes and in highly concentrated liquid electrolytes, characterisation of all-solid-state batteries, electrochemical interfaces and interphases and the development and application of nanoscale electrochemical characterisation techniques.

Bettina Lotsch is director of the Nanochemistry Department at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (MPI-FKF) in Stuttgart, Germany. She studied Chemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) and the University of Oxford and received her PhD from LMU Munich in 2006. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Toronto she was professor at LMU Munich from 2009 to 2017. Simultaneous to her appointment as a director at MPI-FKF Bettina holds an honorary professorship at LMU Munich.

Bettina’s research explores the rational synthesis of new materials by combining the tools of molecular, solid-state and nanochemistry. She was awarded an ERC Starting Grant (2014) and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2014. Her work has been recognised by a number of awards, most recently by the EU-40 Materials Prize 2017 of the European Materials Research Society.

Dr Nella M Vargas-Barbosa obtained her BSc in Chemistry from the University of Puerto Rico – Rio Piedras Campus in 2010. She completed her doctoral work in the field of photo-electrocatalytic water-splitting at The Pennsylvania State University and obtained her PhD in Chemistry in 2015. An Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship supported her stay at the University of Marburg where she developed expertise in the technique of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy in the characterization of highly concentrated liquid and solid electrolytes. Since January 2019, she has been a junior group leader in the Department of Nanochemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. Her research interests encompass the application of electrochemical methods, both transient and ac, for the characterisation and understanding of materials and interfaces for energy conversion and storage. 

Nicole Adelstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at San Francisco State University. Together with her group of undergraduate and master students, she studies ionic diffusion in solid-state materials using molecular dynamics, both quantum and classical simulations. Before arriving at SFSU in 2015, Nicole was a post-doc at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for three years. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in Materials Science and Engineering and her BA from Reed College in Chemistry and Physics. 

Martin Wilkening has been a Full Professor for Physical Solid state Chemistry at the Graz University of Technology since 2011. He is Director of the Christian Doppler Laboratory of Lithium Batteries - a collaboration between TU Graz and industrial companies such as AVL, Infineon and TDK Electronics. He studied Chemistry at the Leibniz University Hannover and obtained his doctoral degree in 2005 with a dissertation on ‘Ultraslow Li Motions in Solids’. His PhD thesis was awarded the Starck-Promotionspreis of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) and the Wissenschaftspreis Hannover. In 2009 he received the ADUC annual award of the GDCh for his contributions to spin-alignment echo NMR to directly probe the shape of single-spin motional correlation functions in solids.

In his workgroup at the TU Graz, cation and anion dynamics in solids are studied with a broad range of NMR techniques and broadband conductivity spectroscopy. Specifically, his research team focusses on self-diffusion processes in nanostructured and amorphous energy materials including mechanosynthesized non-equilibrium compounds and nanoglasses. One overarching aim is to identify the origins of rapid ion exchange in model substances. His work aims to learn how the dimensionality of diffusion pathways and correlation effects influence the elementary steps of ion hopping.

Dr Jacob Eapen joined the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the North Carolina State University in Spring 2008 following post-doctoral training at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He obtained his Doctor of Science (ScD) degree in Nuclear Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006. For a number of years, Dr Eapen has been working on thermal transport and glassy dynamics of supercooled liquids using atomistic simulations. More recently, he has been investigating the ‘thermally jammed’ nature of superionic conduction in fluorites, and phonon transport using atomistic simulations. He has been an investigator on several US Department of Energy (DOE) projects including accident tolerant fuel/clad with silicon carbide composites, and thermokinetics of molten salt mixtures. Dr Eapen has also served as a reviewer in several DOE programs. He currently serves as an executive member of the Materials Science and Technology Division of the American Nuclear Society.

Chris Ling is a Professor and Associate Head (Research) in the School of Chemistry at the University of Sydney, and is also affiliated with the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (ANSTO). This reflects the fact that his research in inorganic solid-state chemistry makes particular use of neutron and synchrotron X-ray scattering methods to characterise the structures and dynamics of new materials. He has particular interests in solid-state ionic conduction at high temperatures, and strongly-correlated electronic behaviour at low temperatures.

Brandon Wood is a Staff Scientist in the Materials Science Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), USA. He received his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT in 2007. His primary research activities lie in the application of first-principles and mesoscale simulation techniques to materials for energy storage and conversion, including solid-state batteries, hydrogen storage media, and electrocatalysts. He is particularly interested in complex dynamics of interfaces and disordered systems. He currently serves as the Deputy Director of the LLNL Laboratory for Energy Applications of the Future (LEAF) and Theory Director of the US Department of Energy Hydrogen Materials--Advanced Research Consortium (HyMARC).

Chris Erik Mohn obtained his PhD from the University of Oslo. During his PhD, he used atomistic simulations to investigate the mechanism of ion transport in fast ion conductors and on the development of statistical methods to model disordered materials. Following his PhD, he moved to Bristol (University of Bristol, UK) and then to France (University of Montpellier), working on complex systems and in particular on the development of genetic algorithms to crystal structure prediction.  Chris is currently working as a researcher at the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics, University of Oslo where he carries out atomistic simulations of lower mantle minerals to learn more about the Earth’s history and dynamics.

Professor Lauren Marbella joined the Chemical Engineering faculty at Columbia University in July 2018 as an Assistant Professor. She received her PhD in 2016 under the direction of Professor Jill Millstone at the University of Pittsburgh. During her PhD, Dr Marbella used a combination of solution and solid-state NMR techniques to study metal nanoparticle formation, structure, and performance. Following her PhD, she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Charles and Katharine Darwin Research Fellowship at Darwin College in the group of Professor Clare Grey at the University of Cambridge. Her postdoctoral research focused on using NMR and MRI to understand the molecular-level processes that control performance degradation in Li- and beyond-Li-ion batteries. At Columbia, her research group focuses on understanding interfacial phenomena and ionic transport in next generation battery materials.

Don Siegel is Professor and Associate Chair for Graduate Education in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan, with courtesy appointments in Materials Science & Engineering and Applied Physics. His research targets the development of energy storage materials and lightweight alloys, primarily for applications in the transportation sector. Prior to joining UM, he was a Technical Expert at Ford Research and Advanced Engineering. Don has authored more than 85 publications, delivered approximately 105 invited lectures, and has been awarded several patents related to energy storage. He is a recipient of the NSF Career Award, Department of Energy-Secretary of Energy’s Achievement Award, and an NAE Gilbreth Lectureship. Professor Siegel received a PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with postdoctoral training at Sandia National Laboratories and at the U.S. Naval Research Lab. During 2015–2016 year he was a VELUX Visiting Professor in the Department of Energy Conversion and Storage at the Technical University of Denmark.

Dr Robert Jack is an interdisciplinary scientist who uses methods of statistical mechanics to address a range of problems in physics and chemistry. His interests include molecular motion in glassy systems and rare events in systems far from equilibrium. After a PhD at Imperial College London and postdoctoral work at Oxford and University of California, Berkeley, he spent 9 years as a member of academic staff in the Physics Department at the University of Bath, before moving in 2017 to Cambridge, where he holds an interdisciplinary position joint between mathematics and chemistry.