Using Electrochemistry for a More Sustainable Future

MIT Associate Professor Betar Gallant utilizes electrochemical reactions to develop new sustainable technologies, including systems that capture carbon dioxide emissions and produce higher-energy rechargeable Li-ion batteries for electric vehicles.

“If you look at some early papers, the concepts of how a lithium-ion battery or a lithium metal anode worked were sketched out by hand — they had been deduced to be true, before the field even had the tools to prove all the mechanisms were actually occurring — yet even now, those ideas are still turning out to be right!” Betar Gallant, MIT associate professor says , “that’s because if you truly understand the basic principles of electrochemistry, you can start to intuit how systems will behave. Once you can do that, you can really begin to engineer better materials and devices.”