Our Team
Describe your team here.
Zeyu Hui is a 4th year PhD student in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics at Columbia University. He received his B.S. in Material Science School from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research interest is understanding the complex transport process inside battery systems with the help of continuum physics-based modeling, and providing guidance to real battery design.
William is a freshman ('25) in SEAS studying Chemical Engineering, originally from Naperville, IL. He is currently working on developing Li-ion batteries, specifically creating thicker electrodes, with Kedi Hu.
Rob graduated from Princeton in 2015 with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. He worked with the battery technology companies Eos Energy Storage and Feasible Inc before coming to Columbia and is now a third year in the Chemical Engineering department. His research focuses on developing extremely low cost battery designs for grid scale energy storage applications.
Kevin is currently a master's student in the chemical engineering department. He graduated from Cooper Union in 2021 with a Bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. Kevin is currently working on characterizing the performance of a vanadium redox flow battery for the sustainable recovery of copper from chalcopyrite.
Kedi is a second-year student in Chemical Engineering, co-advised between Alan West & Dan Steingart. Her research focuses on developing fabrication processes and physics-based transport models to adopt lithium-ion battery chemistries to a low-cost bobbin cell format suitable for grid storage applications. Before Columbia, Kedi graduated from MIT in 2020 with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a B.S. in Architecture.
Karthik graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2018, and is currently a third year in the Chemical Engineering department. His research involves building mathematical models of electrochemical energy storage systems and augmenting them with statistics to better understand the physical phenomena limiting performance.
John Bernard graduated from Northeastern University in 2019 with Bachelors degrees in Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. Before Coming to Columbia, he worked for Nano-C Inc. doing application development and scale-up for nanostructured carbon materials. He is currently a 1st-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and his research is focused on the effects of binders on the transport properties within Li-ion cathodes.
Charles graduated from Ohio State University in 2019 with a Bachelors degree in chemical engineering. Before coming to Columbia, Charles worked at Veelo Technologies as a process engineer where he worked with electroless and electrolytic plating processes of copper and nickel on nonwoven carbon fiber. Charles is currently working with rotating disk electrodes to identify the concentrations of different oxidation states of vanadium, and plans to work with the electrowinning process of iron from the vanadium solution.
Aykut is a Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. student in the Electrochemical Engineering laboratory and the Small Scale Mechanics Laboratory. His research lies on the intersection of Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Medicine. He is currently working on making precision microneedles to better diagnose and treat inner ear disorders. He is co-advised by Alan C. West, PhD, Jeffrey W. Kysar, PhD, and Anil K. Lalwani, MD.
We are interested in a large number of problems that are often characterized as belonging to "electrochemical engineering" as well as the emerging field of microfludics. Applications in electrochemical engineering include electrochemical metallization processes, corrosion, fuel cells, batteries, and waste-treatment processes. Applications in the area of microfluidics include sensors and "labs on a chip." Research efforts are focused mainly on basic issues concerning the design and control of electrochemical systems. A particular application involves studies of both feature and wafer scale phenomena in the copper metallization process that has been introduced into the computer industry for advanced, on-chip interconnects.
Experimental and numerical methods for characterization of mass transfer and reaction mechanisms in electrochemical systems are of particular interest. We have simulated and analyzed a variety of practical metallization and dissolution processes and collaborate closely with researchers in the area of computational fluid dynamics. Our current focus is experimental analysis, utilizing AC-impedance spectroscopy, electrohydrodynamic impedance spectroscopy, and quartz microbalance techniques, in addition to more traditional electrochemical methods. We characterize deposit and surface structures using scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and other methods.