ChBE PhD Candidate Wins MRS Gold Award

Fudong Han, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has recently won a prestigious Gold Graduate Student Award from the Materials Research Society (MRS) Foundation, which he received at the 2017 MRS meeting last month. The MRS graduate student award is intended to honor graduate students whose research displays a high level of excellence and distinction. Students from any institution in the world may apply. However, Han was one of only eight students from top schools, including Northwestern, MIT, and Stanford, to win this award based on presentations offered at the 2017 MRS Spring Meeting. The title of Han’s talk was, “Cathode/electrolyte interface: revisiting the electrochemical stability window of solid electrolytes.”

“My research focuses on the all-solid-state battery. In particular, I study the underlying reasons for the huge electrode/electrolyte interfacial resistance, which is considered the key challenge for all-solid-state batteries,” Han said. “In my MRS talk, I proposed that the electrochemical stability of solid electrolytes was overestimated from the conventional measurement, and the electrochemical decompositions of the solid electrolyte occurs and may cause large interfacial resistances in all-solid-state batteries. I also demonstrated that the performance of all-solid-sate batteries could be largely improved by suppressing the electrochemical decomposition of solid electrolytes. The final goal of my research is to develop intrinsically safe, high energy, long cycle life, and high rate all-solid-state batteries for large-scale energy storage.”

Han received both his B.S. and M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Shandong University in China. Since 2012, he has been a Ph.D. student in ChBE Professor Chunsheng Wang’s lab, where he developed the all-solid-state battery project. Han’s efforts have given way to several research papers, conference presentations, patents and funded proposals. In the past, he has held an All-S.T.A.R. Fellowship, a Harry K. Wells Fellowship, and a Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Student Abroad. Additionally, he was awarded ChBE’s ‘TA of the Year’ for my teaching efforts, and also selected to enter the Future Faculty Program provided by the Clark school. Han’s goal is to one day become a University faculty member.

The Gold and Silver Awards were announced in the MRS Bulletin journal.

Published May 1, 2017