Powering the Future: The Latest Battery Technologies

Erik G. Herbert is a senior staff scientist and Mechanical Properties and Mechanics group lead at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). His expertise lies in the systematic development of methodical, repeatable, verifiable, and hypothesis-driven experiments designed to fill critical knowledge gaps related to structure-property-processing relationships. Before joining ORNL, Erik held a tenured position as a professor of materials science and engineering at Michigan Technological University. He also spent more than 10 years in industry with Nano Instruments, Inc.

Erik earned his PhD at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, under the guidance of Warren C. Oliver and George M. Pharr, both of whom are international visionaries and pioneers in the field of small-scale mechanical behavior and nanoindentation.

Sergiy Kalnaus is a senior staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He joined ORNL’s Materials Science and Technology Division in 2009. His interests are in mechanics of materials and numerical simulations of mass and charge transport to improve battery performance and safety. He received his BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering from Kharkiv Polytechnic University in Ukraine and PhD from the Univeristy of Nevada.

Kalnaus holds seven patents and is the recipient of 2017 R&D100 award for the development of the impact-resistant electrolyte. He is the coauthor of the Handbook of Solid State Batteries.

Nian Liu is an assistant professor at School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. He received BS in 2009 from Fudan University, and PhD in 2014 from Stanford University, where he worked on the structure design for silicon anodes for high-energy lithium-ion batteries. From 2014 to 2016, he conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford University, where he developed in-situ optical microscopy to probe beam-sensitive battery reactions. Liu’s lab at Georgia Tech is broadly interested in the combination of materials, electrochemistry, and operando microscopy for studying global energy challenges. Specifically, his lab focuses on electric vehicle battery and stationary battery science and technologies.

Liu’s publications have been cited over 30,000 times, and he is recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate™. He is the recipient of the Electrochemical Society Daniel Cubicciotti Award (2014), American Chemical Society Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator Award (2015), Chemistry of Materials Up-and-Coming Researcher (2017), Journal of Materials Chemistry A Emerging Investigator (2018), Jim Pope CREATE-X Faculty Fellow (2021), and Nanoscale Emerging Investigator (2022).