Professor Y. Shirley Meng of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at UChicago has been named the winner of the 2023 Energy Storage Materials (ENSM) Award for her work creating better batteries to help fight global climate change.
Each year, the award recognizes an outstanding scientist whose work shows impressive innovation and who has made significant contributions to the field of energy storage materials and devices. Much of Meng’s work in her Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion and as chief scientist for the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science involves improving the performance and durability of recyclable sodium batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage.
“Sustainability must be the foundation of our existence, and energy storage is the enabler of sustainability,” Meng said. “To hit our decarbonization targets, humanity must add another 100 to 200 terawatt-hours of battery storage to the energy grid. We need more batteries, we need better batteries, we need a massive global investment to get there, and we need it fast.”
Meng has led her team in pioneering and developing various integrated advanced operando/in situ characterization techniques to probe atomic rearrangement in energy storage materials and applying the knowledge in design, synthesis, and optimization of energy storage materials and devices.
“It is a true honor to be recognized for my role in the field of energy storage materials,” she said of the award.
Read about Shirley Meng’s “case for hope” in the face of global climate change