Battery Technologies and Markets

Project Leader: Paul Albertus

Paul Albertus is a third year graduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Paul graduated from the University of Michigan in 2003 and then spent a year at the University of York in England studying humanities before resuming his Chemical Engineering education at UC Berkeley in 2004. Paul is a student in the research group of John Newman, which focuses on experiments and mathematical modeling of electrochemical systems. Thus far, Paul’s research has focused on modeling side reactions and nonisothermal effects in nickel metal-hydride batteries (with model validation done using batteries from the Toyota Prius), modeling battery design and usage in hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles, and modeling aging in lithium ion batteries.

Other Team Member(s) Info:

Ilan Gur received a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, where his research focused on the creation and integration of nanostructured materials for the development of ultra low-cost solar cells, a topic on which he has authored several peer-reviewed research articles. At Berkeley, Gur developed and co-taught the first interdisciplinary graduate course on photovoltaic technologies, policy, and economics. Turning his attention from energy generation to storage, Gur now serves as Director of Corporate Development for Seeo, Inc., a start up aimed at commercializing novel materials to enable the next generation of secondary batteries. Gur frequently speaks on the potential of new materials to impact energy technologies, and has worked closely with a number of companies in Silicon Valley to help with their commercialization efforts. Gur is a past recipient of the Berkeley- Mayfield Entrepreneurship Fellowship and the Al Gore Climate Change Fellowship.

Venkat Srinivasan received his bachelors in Electrochemical Engineering from the Central Electrochemical Research Institute (CECRI) in Karaikudi, India, in 1995 and his PhD from the University of South Carolina in Chemical Engineering in 2000. After graduation he worked as a research associate at the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering at Penn State University for 18 months before joining the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is now a Staff Scientist at LBL contributing towards solving the multitude of problems that prevent Li-ion batteries from being used in hybrid and plug in hybrid-electric Vehicles. Venkat brings 12 years of experience on batteries and capacitors and has worked on Ni-MH, lead-acid, Li-ion and alkaline primary batteries, in addition to double-layer and faradaic capacitors. He was the recipient of the Battery Division Student Research Award in 2000. He has taught courses in “Experimental Techniques in Electrochemistry" and "Impedance Spectroscopy" to graduate students and has lectured to high school teachers on "Introduction to Batteries".