The Team

CESET researchers work across UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory address the most-pressing science and technology challenges of our time using electrochemical science and engineering. The team includes world-leading experts across materials and molecular synthesis, catalysis science, surface science, theory and computation, and devices - all driven by the shared collaborative mission to deliver real impact to the world through electrochemical science, engineering, and technology.

Several key CESET researchers at UC Berkeley are highlighted below.

Bryan McCloskey

McCloskey is a leading battery scientist co-appointed at UC Berkeley Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and at LBNL as a Faculty Engineer in the Battery Materials Group in the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Division. His work focuses on improving battery fast charging, developing new earth abundant Li-ion cathode materials, enabling rechargeable metal-air batteries, and designing highly conductive solid ion conductors. He is heavily involved in several leading DOE center efforts to understand and develop the next generation of battery technology.

He has won the Charles W. Tobias Young Investigator Award, The Electrochemical Society (2020), the Tajima Prize, International Society of Electrochemistry (2021), and is Clarivate Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher (2020-2022).

SHANNON BOETTCHER

Boettcher is the Vermeulen Chair in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Chemistry and theDeputy Directorat Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Division at LBL. Previoulsy in Oregon, he founded the Oregon Center for Electrochemistry and is leading the effort to build CESET across UC Berkeley and LBL. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the 2023 Blavatnik Award Laureate in Chemistry. Boettcher leads the NSF CCI, the Center for Interfacial Ionics and works in the Liquid Sunlight Alliance, the Center for Ionomer Based Water Electrolysis (led by Adam Weber at LBNL), and other centers and research programs to support the Energy EarthShot efforts. His research interests span basic-to-applied questions in electrochemical science, to electrochemical device engineering for technology development and translation to commercialization.

Joelle Frechette

Frechette is the President of the Adhesion Society and a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Her work focuses on the study of materials at interfaces, addressing critical issues in adhesion and materials design for a range of technological applications. For this work she has won NSF Career, ONR Young Investigator, 3M faculty, and other awards. In electrochemistry, interfaces between polymer electrolytes and solid electrolyte materials, i.e. soft-hard interfaces, are critical across energy storage and conversion technologies. As part of the DOE Energy EarthShot Center for Ionomer-Based Water Electrolysis, Frechette is leading efforts to measure, model, and control these interactions in advanced electrolyzer devices for low-cost scalable hydrogen production.

Neil Razdan

Razdan, currently a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, is joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in July 2024 as an expert in heterogeneous catalysis and interfacial electrochemistry. Prof. Razdan leads the Catalysis and Carbon Circularity Laboratory (C3L) which focuses on the development of thermochemical and electrochemical catalytic technologies relevant for the decarbonization of the chemical industry and energy sector.

Nitash Balsara

Balsara is the Charles W. Tobias Professor in Electrochemistry and a pioneer in the study of ion transport and the development of advanced electrolytes. His team has invented new microphase separated block copolymers that enable independent control over the electrical and mechanical properties of battery electrolytes. In addition to his team’s leading fundamental studies, Balsara has co-authored the definitive text on Electrochemical Engineering and cofounded two battery start-up companies: Seeo (in 2007) and Blue Current (2014).

Alexis Bell

Bell is the Dow Professor of Sustainable Chemistry, Emeritus (research active) in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UC Berkeley and is a retired Faculty Senior Scientist atLBNL. His research specialty is catalysis and chemical reaction engineering with an emphasis on understanding the fundamental relationships between catalyst structure and composition and catalyst activity and selectivity. The objectives of his program are pursued through a combination of experimental and theoretical methods, enabling the attainment of a deeper understanding of the core issues of interest than can be achieved by using either approach alone. A significant part to Bell’s research has been devoted to understanding the fundamental of electrochemical systems with emphasis on the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), CO₂ reduction reaction (CO₂RR), transport and reaction in bipolar membranes, and the simulation of CO₂RR occurring in aqueous eletrolyzers and membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs). His work has received numerous awards, and he has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and as a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Clay Radke

Radke is a Professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Member of the National Academy of Engineering. He studies surface and colloid science technology, adsorption from solution, interfacial surfactant transport, wetting and spreading, colloid stability, dynamics and stability of thin films, multiphase and disperse phase flow in porous media, chemical transport and reaction in porous media, electrokinetics, pore-level fluid mechanics, biomolecules at interfaces, enzymatic catalysis, cellulose deconstruction kinetics, tear-film dynamics, corneal physiology, contact-lens design, reactions at electrified interfaces, and fuel-cell design. He has recent interesting in the molecular structure of the electrical double layer and how it influences electrochemical reactions of importance for energy conversion and storage.

Kristin Persson

Persson is the Daniel M. Tellep Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, Persson directs the Materials Project which is a multi-institution, multi-national effort to compute the properties of all inorganic materials and provide the data and associated analysis algorithms to researchers free of charge. The Persson Group studies the physics and chemistry of materials using atomistic computational methods and high-performance computing technology, particularly for clean energy production and storage applications that use electrochemical science and technology.

Roya Maboudian

Maboudian is Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Co-Director of the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center. Her research interest is in the surface and materials science and engineering of micro/nanosystems, with applications in health and environmental monitoring, harsh-environment sensing, biomematics, energy technologies ,and sustainability. In electrochemistry, her interest has included metalization and nanostructuring of semiconductor surfaces by electrochemical methods to enable advanced micro- and nano-sensors as well as supercapacitor energy storage devices. It also includes electrochemical methods for enhanced chemical and biochemical sensing towards environmental and health monitoring. Most recently, her interest has expanded to materials and interface science of concrete to understand their failure mechanisms (some electrochemical in nature), to reduce its carbon footprint (responsible for about 9% of anthropogenic CO₂ emission), and to sequester industrial byproducts (e.g., carbon from methane pyrolysis). Maboudian has won many awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and the Beckman Young Investigator award. She has served as editor to the American Chemical Society (ACS) Sensors and the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems (JMEMS), and as associate editor to IEEE/SPIE Journal on Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS and MOEMS (JM3).

Don Tilley

Tilley is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley and a Faculty Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has won numerous awards for his work across inorganic, organometallic, polymer, and materials chemistry and was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2023. His team engages in synthetic, structural, and reactivity studies on transition metal compounds, with a particular focus on new chemical transformations and advanced solid-state materials. In electrochemistry, his team targets the conversion of solar energy and renewable electricity to chemical fuels, innovating in molecular, nanostructured, and surface-attached catalysts to transform stable feedstocks like water and carbon dioxide into fuels such as hydrogen and hydrocarbons.

Dean Toste

Toste is Gerald E. K. Branch Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley and a Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also currently Joel H. Hildebrand Distinguished Professor and Chair in the Department of Chemistry. He has won numerous national and international awards for his work in catalysis and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His research group is broadly focused on the development of catalytic processes and studying the mechanisms of catalytic transformations. In electrochemistry, in additional electrocatalytic transformations, his group is developing organic and supramolecular electrolytes for application in energy storage.

Kwabena Bediako

Bediako is the Cupola Era Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley. His research focuses broadly on charge transport and interfacial charge transfer in two-dimensional materials and heterostructures. In the area of electrochemistry, his interests center on fundamental understanding of how to control interfacial electron transfer rate constants leverage new approaches to tuning the surface electronic structure of solids, for example with novel heterostructured 2D materials.

Gerbrand Ceder

Ceder is the Samsung Distinguished Chair and Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at UC Berkeley and Senior Faculty Scientist in the Materials Sciences Division at LBL. His team uses computational and experimental methods as well as machine learning to design novel materials for energy generation and storage, including lithium and sodium-ion battery chemistries, multi-valent intercalation, and solid-state batteries. He is also driving the science of predictive tools for materials synthesis. Along with Kristin Persson, Ceder co-founded the Materials Project and is the Founder of Computational Modeling Consultants.

Peidong Yang

Yang is the S.K. and Angela Chan Distinguished Professor of Energy Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Materials Research Society Medal. Yang’s research interests lie in the synthesis of new classes of materials and nanostructures, with an emphasis on developing improved understand of structural assembly and growth to enable rational control of nanostructure, material composition, property, and functionality. His team has made major contributions to electrochemical materials science, including building and studying nanowire related photoelectrochemical cells, bio-electrochemical hybrid materials, and electrocatalyst architectures for chemical and fuel electrosynthesis.

Kranthi Mandadapu

Mandadapu is a theorist and is interested in the emergent behaviors of systems at multiple length and time scales. His research is at the intersection of statistical mechanics, continuum mechanics, and applied mathematics. He developed theories and associated computational methods to understand transport phenomena in electrolyte solutions. His recent work includes the development of the Onsager transport framework for multicomponent electrolyte solutions. His current interests are to explore the role of electrochemistry and electromechanics relevant to energy and biophysical systems, with a particular focus on neurological signaling.

Michael Zuerch

Zuerch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley. His team experimentally explore structural and electronic dynamics on surfaces and at interfaces to answer both fundamental and technology relevant questions in materials science and physical chemistry. In his research he pursues a multidisciplinary research program that combines ultrafast X-ray spectroscopy and nanoimaging and integrates interface studies with collaborative material synthesis and theory. In electrochemistry, he is specifically interested in developing novel time-resolved interface spectroscopies to study the electrochemical interface and the dynamics of the ions, solvent, and surface species in of relevance to energy conversion and storage technology.

Zuerch was previously a Max Planck Research Group Leader (W2) at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin. He has won the Keck Foundation Science and Engineering Research Award, Fresnel Prize, and the DOE Early Career Award and has been named a Hellman Fellow.

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The Team