ESE Seminar - Yi Cui: Reinventing Batteries Through Nanoscience

Yi Cui
Fortinet Founders Professor
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Department of Energy Science and Engineering, Stanford University

This meeting is in Room 104 and can also be viewed in Room 014

Abstract

The fast growth of power sources for transportation and grid-scale stationary storage presents great opportunities for new battery chemistries. How to increase energy density, reduce cost, speed up charging, extend life, enhance safety and reuse/recycle are critical challenges. Here I will present how we utilize nanoscience to reinvent batteries and address many of challenges by understanding the materials and interfaces through new tools and providing design principles of new materials. The topics to be discussed include: materials design to enable high capacity materials: Si and Li metal anodes and S cathodes; a set of tools including cryogenic electron microscopy for understanding thermodynamic, kinetic and structural information off battery chemistries.

Bio

Yi Cui is the Fortinet Founders Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering,
Energy Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He serves the director of the Precourt Institute
for Energy. He holds a joint appointment in SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. His training
includes a B.S. in chemistry in 1998 at the University of Science & Technology of China, a Ph.D. in
physical chemistry in 2002 at Harvard University, followed by a Miller Postdoctoral Fellowship at
University of California, Berkeley. In 2005 he joined the Stanford faculty. He has published
approximately 540 research papers and has an outstanding index impact score of 240 (Google
Scholar). In 2014, he was ranked #1 in materials science by Thomson Reuters’ “The World’s Most
Influential Scientific Minds.” In 2022, Cui was elected as a member of the National Academy of
Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Materials Research Society,
Electrochemical Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is an executive editor of Nano
Letters. He is a co-director of the Battery 500 Consortium and co-director of Stanford’s StorageX
Initiative. His selected awards include the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Award (2020), MRS
Medal (2020), and Blavatnik National Laureate (2017). He has founded six companies to
commercialize technologies from his group: Amprius, 4C Air, EEnotech, EnerVenue, LifeLabs Design
and EnnoPure Inc. Amprius, a leading high energy density battery company, was recently listed
(AMPX) in the New York Stock Exchange.