News Release
UC San Diego battery pioneer Shirley Meng earns Faraday Medal from Royal Society of Chemistry
San Diego, Calif., April 6, 2020 -- Congratulations to UC San Diego nanoengineering professor Shirley Meng, who has earned the 2020 Faraday Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Meng is a leader in materials characterization and synthesis, including development of novel battery technologies that are driving a low-carbon, more sustainable future.
As the faculty leader of the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, Meng leads a research team that is pioneering smaller, more efficient batteries that can harness wind and solar energy to fuel items like electric vehicles and the stations used to charge them.
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| UC San Diego nanoengineering professor Shirley Meng |
“It is an extraordinary time with COVID-19 crisis, yet my team continues to push the frontiers of energy storage technologies during this difficult time. The physical distancing leaves us a bit more time to plan for the next big wave in breakthroughs of energy storage technologies,” said Meng. “I believe that the uptake for renewable energy is unstoppable. The ability for us to store electrons with batteries indeed makes renewable energy sources reliable and economically viable.”
The Faraday Medal is awarded annually by the Electrochemistry Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry to an electrochemist working outside the UK and Ireland in recognition of their outstanding original contributions and innovation as a mid career researcher in any field of electrochemistry. Meng is scheduled to deliver the Faraday Medal lecture at Electrochem 2020 in Nottingham, UK in September 2020.
Meng is the founding director of the Sustainable Power and Energy Center at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the inaugural director of the UC San Diego Institute for Materials Discovery and Design. Meng is also the inaugural holder of the Zable Endowed Chair in Energy Technologies in the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
Meng has authored or co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, two book chapters and four issued patents. She is the recipient of a number of awards, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the UC San Diego Chancellor’s Interdisciplinary Collaboratories Award, the Charles W. Tobias Award from the Electrochemical Society and the International Battery Association Research Award.
Meng received her doctorate in advanced materials for micro and nano systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance in 2005, after which she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow and became a research scientist at MIT. She joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2009.
Media Contacts
Daniel Kane
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-534-3262
dbkane@ucsd.edu