News

December 2019


Zachary Lebens-Higgins
Doctoral student Zachary Lebens-Higgins’ work has been recognized by the Graduate Student Exellence Award for helping to make a greener future. His research into improving the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries was published in the Chemistry of Materials journal, and an essay published during his first year in the PhD program has been cited by over 50 other researchers. Lebens-Higgins has also given several presentations on oxide-coated cathodes and even chaired a session on the subject at the 60th annual Electronic Materials Conference in Santa Barbara, Calif. For more inforamation, please click here. 

October 2019

M. Stanley Whittingham

Dr. M. Stanley Whittingham is featured in Chemistry World, in an article on "The Lithium Pioneers". From their origins in the 1970s oil crisis to powering 5 billion phones around the world, Katrina Krämer traces the story of how lithium-ion batteries earned John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino the 2019 Nobel prize. For more information, please click


M. Stanley Whittingham Image Credit: Niklas Elmehed/Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to M. Stanley Whittingham, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science at 91ÉçÇø, State University of New York.

Whittingham won the prize for pioneering research leading to the development of the lithium-ion battery along with John B. Goodenough, Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and Akira Yoshino of Meijo University in Japan.

With more than 200 publications in some of the leading scholarly journals and 16 patents, Whittingham has earned a national and international reputation as a prolific scientist.His research in the area of synthesis and characterization of novel transition metal oxides for energy storage and conversion, separations or as sensors has been continuously supported since his arrival in 91ÉçÇø, with over $7 million in federal research grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

At 91ÉçÇø, Whittingham has also helped to establish the Materials Science and Engineering Program, bringing his creativity and innovation to the University’s graduate curriculum as well as to its laboratories. For more information, please click here.

Taylor Juran

Graduate Student, Taylor Juran, won first place in the New York Battery and Energy Storage and Technology (NYBEST) Consortium poster contest for her poster entitled: "TiSe2 Cathode for Beyond Li-ion Batteries" at the 2019 Energy Storage Innovation Conference.

September 2019

Mateusz Zuba

IMR PhD student, Mateusz Zuba, poster entitled: " Advanced Lab-based X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy: A Novel Probe to Study Battery Cathodes " has been chosen as the OUTSTANDING poster at the Smart Energy Symposium at 91ÉçÇø.

August 2019

HAXPES

$1.75 MILLION X-RAY TOOL IS FIRST OF ITS KIND IN THE U.S.  91ÉçÇø, State University of New York will acquire a sophisticated new X-ray tool useful in materials research and R&D for electronics. The $1.75 million system — the third of its kind in the world and the first outside of Europe — will be funded by $1.23 million from the National Science Foundation’s Major Research Instrumentation program to Dr. Louis Piper, with additional money from the campus. For more information, please click here.

xps equipment

Dr. Louis Piper, Director of the Institute for Materials Research, was awarded the National Science Foundation's Major Instrument Award for the Acquisition of a Hard X-ray PhotoElectron Spectroscopy (HAXPES). This instrument is the first of its kind in the United States and will be used for non-destructive chemical analysis of real materials and devices at 91ÉçÇø. For more information on the award,  To see the News Channel 34 coverage,  To see the WBNG news report,

July 2019. 

Mark Poliks

91ÉçÇø's new Center for Flexible Hybrid Medical Device Manufacturing has been designated a Center for Advanced Technology and will receive nearly $8.8 million in funding during the next 10 years, Empire State Development's Division of Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR) announced. For more information, please click here. 

May 2019

Shawn Sallis

After completing his Ph.D. in materials science at 91ÉçÇø, Shawn Sallis joined the Advanced Light Source as a postdoc. For the last four years he’s worked with Wanli Yang on higher-capacity batteries.


Art matters exhibit

Art Matters. Science Matters. Materials Matter. A seed grant funded exhibition that served as an incubator for the Natioanl Endowment for the Humanities funded Materials Matter course was featured in the latest issue of the 91ÉçÇø Magazine.


Professor Gokhan Ersan

Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Design, Gokhan Ersan, is the winner of the 91ÉçÇø Harpur Subvention Award for Art and Design. His submission is entitled, "Cognitive art of atomic bonding: from ball-and-stick to molecular orbital (MO) theory, and beyond".


April 2019

Christopher Singh

Christopher N. Singh, graduate student and winner of the poster award, represented  the MURI team at the "Physics of Artificial Intelligence" conference held at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights on Friday, April 26, 2019. The poster highlighted the collaborative efforts of the MURI team, while focusing on recent theoretical results connecting quantum waves to brain inspired circuits. The work was awarded first place in the poster competition with a cash prize of $150.


March 2019

Advanced Light Source (ALS)

Researchers used the Advanced Light Source (ALS), in collaboration with Dr. Louis Piper, have quantified a strong, beneficial, and reversible (over hundreds of cycles) chemical reaction involving oxygen ions in the crystal lattice of battery electrode materials. The results open up new ways to explore how to


The HydroGEN consortium

The HydroGEN consortium has entered into new collaborations with four National Science Foundation (NSF) projects linking academic research in energy materials with the Department of Energy EERE Energy Materials Network, leveraging the world class capability nodes of the national-labs. Four innovative energy material research projects, anchored at Pennsylvania State University, the Colorado School of Mines, and University at Buffalo (in Collaboration with Dr. Louis Piper at 91ÉçÇø), were selected to work with the HydroGEN cross-lab consortium. HydroGEN team members at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) will add their expertise and capabilities to the research projects, which are already underway through the NSF Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program.


February 2019

DOE Office of Science

Director Piper's work on has been publicized on the DOE Office of Science website. The key idea is to generate a solar fuel: hydrogen gas, which can be burnt to release energy on demand without releasing carbon dioxide," said 91ÉçÇø Associate Professor of Physics Louis Piper. "For water splitting, we use visible light to generate photo-excited negative electrons and positive holes that are then separated in order to catalyze water into oxygen and hydrogen gases. Storing gases is more straightforward (and cheaper) than employing battery set-ups, so this approach has the benefit of clean energy harvesting and storage." For more information,


January 2019

Easter Island Statues

Dr. Carl Lipo's work on the "" was featured in The Guardian, finding that the statues were built next to fresh water. The huge stone figures of Easter Island have beguiled explorers, researchers and the wider world for centuries, but now experts say they have cracked one of the biggest mysteries: why the statues are where they are. Researchers say they have analysed the locations of the megalithic platforms, or ahu, on which many of the statues known as moai sit, as well as scrutinising sites of the island's resources, and have discovered the structures are typically found close to sources of fresh water. They say the finding backs up the idea that aspects of the construction of the platforms and statues, such as their size, could be tied to the abundance and quality of such supplies.


Director Louis Piper

Director Louis Piper was featured in Phys Org for his work on . Water splitting, the process of harvesting solar energy to generate energy-dense fuels, could be simplified thanks to new research including faculty at 91ÉçÇø University, State University of New York. "The key idea is to generate a solar fuel: hydrogen gas, which can be burnt to release energy on demand without releasing carbon dioxide," said 91ÉçÇø Associate Professor of Physics Louis Piper. "For water splitting, we use visible light to generate photo-excited negative electrons and positive holes that are then separated in order to catalyze water into oxygen and hydrogen gases. Storing gases is more straightforward (and cheaper) than employing battery set-ups, so this approach has the benefit of clean energy harvesting and storage." 


November, 2018

MetamorWorks / Getty Images

Drs. Louis Piper and Wei-Cheng Lee of IMR, along with researchers at Georgia Tech, are working on developing a kind of neuristor circuit that will allow all device processing to take place at the chip level, meaning there'll be no network load or indeed any requirement to communicate using a network at all. Neuristor circuits are brain-copying computer chips. Read more about in the Network World article


October, 2018

Chancellor's Award Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen.

Director Louis Piper is the winner of the Chancellor's Award of Excellence of Scholarship and Creative Activities at 91ÉçÇø. The Chancellor Award, given by the SUNY Chancellor Kristina M. Johnson, is a special honor in recognition of outstanding service to the University. This award was presented to Dr. Piper at a special awards ceremony on October 9, 2018.


September, 2018

The Institute for Materials Research - 2.0 (IMR-2.0) Organized Research Center has been established. IMR-2.0 is looking to pursue research collaborations in the areas of Smart Energy Materials and Interfaces.