ECS and the Battery Division are pleased to announce the K. M. Abraham Travel Awards, established with a $50,000 endowed gift from Kuzhikalail M. Abraham. The annual awards, made from proceeds of the gift, recognize promising students in the science and engineering areas of electrochemical energy storage and conversion, and are intended to help defray the costs of travel, lodging, registration, and subsistence for students to present a paper at an Electrochemical Society meeting, in a symposium sponsored by the Battery Division.
“It is important that we support students and encourage them to go to ECS meetings,” says Abraham. “When I was young and just starting my career, I greatly benefitted from traveling to the meetings, and I am happy to help others at the beginning of their careers. I hope by supporting this travel grant program that I will influence others to also give back to ECS.”
Abraham has been a member of ECS for almost 40 years and he served as the Battery Division Chair, and thus on the ECS Board of Directors, 2006 to 2008. He held various other positions within the division and Society and has published almost 100 papers in ECS journals and proceeding volumes.
Abraham is the principal of E-KEM Sciences, a battery consulting company in Needham, Mass. and a professor at the Center for Renewable Energy Technology (NUCRET), Northeastern University, Boston, Mass. He was previously president of Covalent Associates, Inc, Woburn, Mass., and senior scientist, group leader, vice president and director of battery research and development at EIC Laboratories, Inc., Norwood, Mass. Over his illustrious career, he has conducted pioneering research on rechargeable lithium, lithium-ion, lithium-polysulfide, and lithium-air batteries. His experience in the battery field helped explain the phenomenon of hoverboard battery explosions in 2016. It is fitting that ECS will be able to announce this gift during the Battery Division’s celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the Li-ion battery at PRiME in October.
Shirley Meng, treasurer of the Battery Division, oversees the administration of the division’s travel grant programs. “This exceptionally generous gift from K.M. is greatly needed and will make a big impact on our ability to support students,” she remarked. “The requests we receive for travel grants is increasing every year and we hope that we can identify more donors to support this important program which provides great networking and experience for our next generation of scientists.”
Dr. Abraham’s gift, along with the newly established Battery Division Postdoctoral Associate Research Award sponsored by MTI Corporation and the Jiang Family Foundation, gives the Battery Division a great boost for their programming. This kind of support also helps ECS’s overall goal of building the Free the Science fund. When divisions identify outside revenue for their programmatic activities, ECS can contribute more operational funds to building this important fund over the next decade that will ultimately provide free and complete open access to our Digital Library for authors and readers.
Learn more about the K. M. Abraham Travel Award.
