The Electrochemical Society hosted Prof. Raphaële J. Clément’s live online webinar, “From order to disorder: NMR insights into ionic conduction in battery materials,” on October 27, 2021. Below are answers to questions posed during the presentation.

Raphaële Clément is an Assistant Professor in the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), U.S. She received her PhD in Chemistry in 2016 from the University of Cambridge, UK, working under the supervision of Prof. Clare Grey. Her doctoral work focused on the study of layered sodium transition metal oxide cathodes for Na-ion secondary batteries. She then joined Prof. Gerbrand Ceder’s group at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), U.S., focusing on cation-disordered rock salt oxyfluorides for Li-ion battery applications. She joined the UCSB faculty in 2018. Her primary research focus is the development and implementation of magnetic resonance techniques (experimental and computational) for the study of battery materials and beyond, with a strong emphasis on operando tools. She is an Associate Editor for Battery Energy, a new open access journal by Wiley. (more…)

Michael Hecht responds to ECS Lecture questions

Michael H. Hecht delivered the ECS Lecture, Electrolysis on Mars: MOXIE and the Perseverance Mission, at the Plenary Session of the 240th ECS Meeting on October 11, 2021. Answers to questions posed during his lecture follow.

Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

Michael Hecht is the Associate Director for Research Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Haystack Observatory. Since 2013, he has been Principal Investigator for the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) instrument on NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover (Perseverance) mission, a technology demonstrator to validate the instrumentation and methodology to produce large quantities of oxygen from the Martian carbon dioxide atmosphere using solid oxide electrolysis (SOXE). From September 2019 to August 2020, Professor Hecht served as Deputy Project Director for the Event Horizon Telescope, the consortium that in 2019 delivered the first image of a black hole. His diverse experiences span planetary missions, observational astrophysics, space instrument and SmallSat development, planetary science, and project, program, and line management. Prior to joining MIT, he worked for 30 years at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), developing instrumentation for planetary missions. There he achieved the designation of Senior Research Scientist. At JPL, he served as Principal Investigator and Instrument Manager for the MECA (Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer) instrument on the Phoenix Mars mission. MECA operated through the summer of 2009, with major findings in microscopy, the physical chemistry of water in soil, and notably, in aqueous soil chemistry using electrochemical methods. 

Prof. Hecht received his PhD in Applied Physics at Stanford University in 1982 after completing his BA in Physics at Princeton University and MS at MIT. His research has garnered numerous awards including the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and 1990 Lew Allen Award for Excellence. His h-index is 51 with over 11,500 citations. (more…)

Bo Zhang
Professor
Department of Chemistry
University of Washington, Seattle

Date: October 22, 2021
Time: 1300 – 1400h PST
Price: There is no cost to register for this event.

The webinar is open to the public; ECS membership is not required.
You must preregister through ECS My Account.
Don’t have one? It’s easy to create—visit Create an Account now.

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