MSE professor honored with NSF Early Career award

Andrej Singer, assistant professor of Materials Science and Engineering, was recently honored with a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program award.

The award supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Research and activities pursued by early-career faculty build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. Over the next five years, Singer will receive over $700,000 to support his research.

“This NSF CAREER award project, supported by the Solid State and Materials Chemistry program in the Division of Materials Research, seeks to understand degeneration in cathodes and find what makes a sodium-ion cathode material durable. The project uses advanced x-ray characterization, thereby allowing researchers to see processes inside of real operating batteries at the nanometer length-scale in real-time. Through advancing fundamental understanding this work has a societal impact by laying the foundation for the improved design of novel energy storage materials. The project further aims at fostering diversity in the field of materials science through creating and disseminating to elementary, middle and high school students hands-on experiments for experiencing the importance of periodicity, nanotechnology, and microscopy.”