Growing up in southern China, Jing Wang knew she wanted to pursue a career in science. But reading the book Silent Spring, about the environmental harm caused by pesticides, pushed her to use her scientific talents to help make Earth a better place.
“It was about how human activity impacts the environment,” she said. “Environmental pollution influences our quality of life, and the next generation’s, too. I decided I wanted to be an engineer to contribute to a better planet by studying the energy storage field.”
At Sun Yat-sen University in China, she got her first taste of battery research. Excited to do more, she applied for graduate school at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME). “I was excited about the close collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory,” she said. “And the school has diverse research directions in energy storage.”
Though her first year was spent remotely working in China due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she arrived on campus the following year. In 2022, she switched to the group of Prof. Shirley Meng and found her stride in studying cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries.
Used to power most electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries are expensive to make, largely because they employ cobalt as a cathode material. Cobalt mining has been implicated in both environmental and ethical quagmires, and it is expensive. “If we can reduce the usage of cobalt, it will decrease the cost of batteries,” Wang said. But finding a suitable replacement material is difficult. Other materials cause the battery to degrade faster, affecting performance and stability.