RCSA Connections, Conversations Spur Energy Storage Project
Three members of RCSA’s community of scientists are among an interdisciplinary team recently awarded a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $4 million over four years to advance discovery and design of energy storage materials.
Cottrell Scholar 2018 and Scialog: Advanced Energy Storage Fellow Chad Risko, chemistry, University of Kentucky, is the principal investigator on the project. Cottrell Scholar 2016 Scott Shaw, chemistry, University of Iowa, and Scialog AES Fellow Susan Odom, chemistry, University of Kentucky, are co-PIs. Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Iowa State University, and Sara Mason, University of Iowa, are also co-PIs.
The team credits the multiple RCSA connections between them for sowing the seeds of the project.
“Some of the ideas emerged from Scialog: AES,” Risko said. “These ideas were further developed through conversations that came from members of our team being involved in the RCSA community.”
This project addresses the pressing need for portable energy storage by bringing together researchers from many different disciplines, including materials design, computational materials chemistry, data analytics, and machine learning. The group expects to develop new robotic capabilities to create and test materials, compile an expansive, open-access database for the research community and public, and new machine-learning models to help design and develop new materials.
“The scale of the problem that we are tackling is quite large, and the problem is so complex, that it takes knowledge from these different fields to appropriately address the complexity,” Risko said.
The project aims to design materials for new generations of batteries by capitalizing on advances in the mass collection, creation, analysis and modeling of experimental and computational data.
“The development of materials to meet the stringent safety and energy density requirements for these varied energy storage needs has been stymied by limitations in the chemistry that has been explored,” Risko said, in part due to self-limiting trial-and-error approaches that often define materials creation and testing.
This project also has a significant workforce training component. In addition to recruiting and training undergraduate students in energy-centered research, with emphasis on first-generation students from rural communities, the project will create a leadership academy to train early-career faculty to lead large-scale research centers. And, as part of their work, the scientists and engineers working on the project will be cross-trained in the language and techniques of the diverse fields represented.
Risko and Odom are Scialog AES Fellows. Though they are colleagues at the University of Kentucky, they said the atmosphere at the Scialog meetings provided a critical platform for them to discuss new ideas leading to several aspects of the proposal.
Risko and Shaw first met at the 2018 Cottrell Scholars Conference, where they discovered common scientific interests, which led to Shaw becoming a co-PI on the proposal. Risko and Shaw also share an enthusiasm for science communication. They are both part of the 10-person Cottrell Scholars Collaborative for a Science Communication Enabled Community, which held its first workshop, “Communicating Ideas,” in October 2019.
“This is the kind of synergy we hope for when we get these outstanding scientists together at RCSA conferences,” said RCSA Senior Program Director Richard Wiener. “Beyond the funding our programs provide, Scialog Fellows and Cottrell Scholars build communities, often interconnecting, that accelerate the advancement of fundamental science and increase their impact.”
