Chibueze Amanchukwu is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. He received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Texas A&M University as the department’s Outstanding Graduating Student, and his PhD in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As a graduate student with Paula Hammond, he elucidated polymer degradation mechanisms and tuned polymer electrolyte behavior in lithium-air batteries. His graduate work was supported by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, GEM Fellowship, and the Alfred P. Sloan Minority Fellowship. As a postdoctoral fellow with Zhenan Bao at Stanford University, he developed new small molecule electrolytes that decoupled ionic conductivity from electrochemical instability for lithium metal batteries. His postdoctoral work was supported by the TomKat Center Postdoctoral Fellowship in Sustainable Energy at Stanford.
His research has been recognized with awards from the American Chemical Society (Excellence in Graduate Polymer Research) and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (Session’s Best Paper). Amanchukwu has been named a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar and received an NSF CAREER award, 3M Nontenured Faculty Award, and an ECS Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship, among other recognitions.
Interested in joining the Amanchukwu Lab?
The Amanchukwu Lab is actively recruiting graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and undergraduates to join us on the quest for designing and understanding next generation electrolytes for batteries and catalysis. You can expect to push boundaries in chemical synthesis, in-situ characterization tools, and electrochemistry. Learn more by visiting the lab page.
Amanchukwu Lab's mission at PME is to creatively solve energy-related challenges, especially focused on energy storage and electrocatalysis. Within energy storage and electrocatalytic devices, electrolytes are a vital component that support ionic and molecular transport. The Amanchukwu Lab is focused on the design and synthesis of novel electrolyte media (solid state and liquid), and the study of electrolyte instability and ionic transport phenomena for applications in batteries and electrocatalysis. Borrowing concepts from chemistry and tools from biology, we aim to control interfacial phenomena at the electrode/electrolyte interface, understand degradation mechanisms, and use advanced characterizations tools (especially at Argonne National Lab) for in situ and operando understanding of energy devices.