News Release

Nanoengineer Shirley Meng among battery experts featured in NOVA program

UC San Diego Professor Shirley Meng

San Diego, CA, February 02, 2017: 

There is definitely a race. Who will invent the next big battery technology?

UC San Diego Nanoengineering professor Shirley Meng poses this question near the beginning of a new NOVA program called “Search for the Super Battery.”

Professor Meng is the director of the Sustainable Power and Energy Center at UC San Diego, where she also leads the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion in the Department of NanoEngineering.

The NOVA “Search for the Super Battery” program description is below.

We live in an age when technological innovation seems to be limitlessly soaring. But for all the satisfying speed with which our gadgets have improved, many of them share a frustrating weakness: the batteries. Though they have improved in last century, batteries remain finicky, bulky, expensive, toxic, and maddeningly short-lived. The quest is on for a “super battery,” and the stakes in this hunt are much higher than the phone in your pocket. With climate change looming, electric cars and renewable energy sources like wind and solar power could hold keys to a greener future...if we can engineer the perfect battery. Join host David Pogue as he explores the hidden world of energy storage, from the power—and danger—of the lithium-ion batteries we use today, to the bold innovations that could one day charge our world.

Media Contacts

Liezel Labios
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-246-1124
llabios@ucsd.edu