Dr. Venkat Viswanathan wins the 2024 Energy Lectureship Award for Energy Storage by ACS Energy Letters

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Venkat Viswanathan, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of Aionics, Inc., has been awarded the prestigious 2024 Energy Lectureship Award for Energy Storage by ACS Energy Letters.

Dr. Viswanathan is an Associate Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he leads a pioneering interdisciplinary group working on technologies that can accelerate the transition to sustainable transportation and aviation. His contributions to the field have been recognized through numerous awards, including MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry, and the National Science Foundation CAREER award.

As Chief Scientist at Aionics, Dr. Viswanathan champions the deployment of machine learning-based approaches to industrial R&D. He believes that the Aionics commitment to high-quality science and innovative data and modeling tools positions the company to make a significant impact in the field of clean energy.

Below are some of his contributions to ACS Energy Letters:

He has worked on key problems related to next-generation battery chemistries such as lithium anode batteries (DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.9b02306) and fluorinated cathodes (10.1021/acsenergylett.0c01815) to unlock new opportunities for batteries in electric mobility applications. In a Bell Laboratories-like approach, these fundamental studies are motivated by techno-economic considerations for a variety of applications like semi trucks (10.1021/acsenergylett.7b00432) and electric aviation (10.1021/acsenergylett.8b02195 and 10.1021/acsenergylett.9b02574). Notably, the study on semi trucks is discussed in Bill Gates’s book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.

• Pande, V.; Viswanathan, V. Computational Screening of Current Collectors for Enabling Anode-Free Lithium Metal Batteries. ACS Energy Lett. 2019, 4 (12), 2952–2959. DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.9b02306
• Krishnamurthy, V.; Viswanathan, V. Beyond Transition Metal Oxide Cathodes for Electric Aviation: The Case of Rechargeable CF_x. ACS Energy Lett. 2020, 5 (11), 3330–3335. DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.0c01815
• Sripad, S.; Viswanathan, V. Performance Metrics Required of Next-Generation Batteries to Make a Practical Electric Semi Truck. ACS Energy Lett. 2017, 2 (7), 1669–1673. DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.7b00432
• Fredericks, W. L.; Sripad, S.; Bower, G. C.; Viswanathan, V. Performance Metrics Required of Next-Generation Batteries to Electrify Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) Aircraft. ACS Energy Lett. 2018, 3 (12), 2989–2994. DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.8b02195
• Bills, A.; Sripad, S.; Fredericks, W. L.; Singh, M.; Viswanathan, V. Performance Metrics Required of Next-Generation Batteries to Electrify Commercial Aircraft. ACS Energy Lett. 2020, 5 (2), 663–668. DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.9b02574

Please join us in congratulating Venkat on this recognition and in celebrating his ongoing contributions to advancing energy storage technologies.

Read more about the 2024 Energy Lectureship Awards for Energy Storage here.