Event
CHBE Seminar: Dr. Y. Shirley Meng, UChicago
Friday, October 24, 2025
11:00 a.m.
Room 2108 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building
Patricia Lorenzana
301-405-1935
plorenza@umd.edu
The Global Race for A Better Battery
Abstract: High energy long life rechargeable battery is considered as the key enabling technology for deep de-carbonization. Energy storage in the electrochemical form is attractive because of its high efficiency and fast response time. The world will need more than 10TWh per year battery capacity in the next decade in order to accelerate the energy transition. In this talk, I will discuss a few new perspectives for energy storage materials including new superionic conductors, new reactive metal anodes and their interfacial engineering. With recent advances in photon and electron characterization tools and computational methods, we can explore ionic mobility, charge transfer and phase transformations in electrode and electrolyte materials in solid state battery. Most recently we established ESRA, Energy Innovation Hub funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) focused on energy storage beyond lithium ion. ESRA aims to enable transformative discoveries in materials chemistry by leveraging the most cutting-edge scientific tools, particularly machine learning tools and generative AI, in coordination with autonomous experiments.
Bio: Dr. Y. Shirley Meng is the Liew Family Professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. She serves as the Chief Scientist of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Meng is the director of Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA), an innovation hub funded in 2024 by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science. She is the principal investigator of the research group - Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion (LESC), that was established at University of California San Diego since 2009. She held the Zable Chair Professor in Energy Technologies at UC San Diego from 2017-2022 and founded the Sustainable Power and Energy Center (SPEC) in 2016. Dr. Meng received several prestigious awards, including Shep Wolsky Battery Innovation Award (2025), Lifetime Achievement Award, NATTBatt International Trade Association (2025), ACS Research Excellence in Electrochemistry (2024), ECS Battery Division Research Award (2023), the C3E technology and innovation award (2022), the Faraday Medal of Royal Chemistry Society (2020), International Battery Association IBA Research Award (2019), Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists Finalist (2018), C.W. Tobias Young Investigator Award of the Electrochemical Society (2016) and NSF CAREER Award (2011). Dr. Meng is elected Fellow of Electrochemical Society (FECS), Fellow of Materials Research Society (FMRS) and Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She is the author and co-author of more than 325 peer-reviewed journal articles, two book chapters and twelve issued patents. Dr. Meng received her Ph.D. in Advanced Materials for Micro & Nano Systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance in 2005. She received her bachelor’s degree in Materials Science with first class honor from Nanyang Technological University of Singapore in 2000. She co-founded UNIGRID, a USA-based sodium battery startup company and ExPost Technology, a USA-based battery upcycling startup company.
