Â鶹AV

Emanuel Peled is the inventor and developer of the Solid-Electrolyte-Interphase (SEI) model for nonaqueous alkali-metal batteries. This model constitutes a paradigm change in the understanding of lithium batteries and has thus enabled the development of safer, durable, higher-power and lower-cost batteries. He was the first to develop (1979) a lithium/sulfur cell (a 2/3A size cell). Several fuel cells have been developed, including a direct methanol and for the first time a direct ethylene glycol fuel cell and a hydrogen tribromide fuel cell. He is a co-founder of three energy-related start-up companies. Prof. Peled received several awards including the 2023 Israel Prize of Chemistry, the ECS Battery Division Research Award, the IBA Award and the Israel Chemical Society Outstanding Scientist Award. He is a Fellow of ECS and ISE.

Yuzhang Li is an Associate Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. He received his bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University. The long-term goal of the Li group@UCLA is to invent new tools and materials that address important challenges in sustainability and health. For example, we are leading efforts to leverage the powerful cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) tool to address grand challenges in sustainability. These efforts have led to significant breakthroughs in our understanding of batteries (Science 358, 506, 2017; Science 375, 66, 2022) and electrocatalysts (Nature Energy 8, 138, 2023), which represent important clean energy technologies necessary for mitigating climate change. New insights then inform parallel efforts in materials innovations (Nature 620, 86, 2023) that will enable transformative technologies. Yuzhang’s research has been highlighted by news media including Forbes, Popular Mechanics, and ABC7 Bay Area, while also being recognized with several awards, including the Packard Fellowship, Forbes 30 Under 30, and young investigator awards from the NSF, DOE, NIH, ONR, ARO, ACS and ECS.

Lauren Marbella is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University. Her research group focuses on understanding the relationship between electrochemical performance and interfacial chemistry in devices for energy storage and conversion. Marbella’s research has received numerous awards including the ASME Rising Star of Mechanical Engineering Award (2024), ACS Materials Au Rising Stars in Materials Research Award (2022), Cottrell Scholar Award (2022), the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (2021), and the Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award for Advanced Energy Storage (Sloan Foundation, 2019).
She received her PhD in chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2016, under the direction of Prof. Jill Millstone. In 2017, she was named a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge in the group of Prof. Clare Grey. There, she was also named the Charles and Katharine Darwin Research Fellow, which recognizes the top junior fellow at Darwin College at the University of Cambridge. She joined the chemical engineering faculty at Columbia University in 2018.