President Obama named Dr. Adam Weber as one of this year’s recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their career. He was nominated based on his applied research on fuel cells for the Department of Energy.
Transport phenomena in electrochemical technologies are at the crux of Adam Weber’s research interests. He has studied water and thermal management, durability, and manufacturing issues in low-temperature fuel cells, through both mathematical modeling and advanced component diagnostics. This work has interacted with various industrial partners and has led to many fruitful joint-collaborations aimed at optimizing, understanding, and improving the technologies.
His fuel-cell work is now being leveraged into improving redox flow-batteries for grid-scale electrical energy storage. Working together with Berkeley Lab scientists Venkat Srinivasan, Vincent Battaglia, and research associate Kyu Taek Cho, the team has developed what is believed to be one of the highest power density flow-batteries to date.
Adam Weber’s current research is also focused on transport and properties of ion-conducting polymers, especially their existence as both membranes and thin films in electrode structures for various electrochemical technologies. Additional interests include understanding and optimizing solar-fuel generators, as done at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, where Dr. Weber is the Modeling and Simulation Team (MaST) lead.
Although still early in his career, Adam has already developed a long list of industry collaborations and partners with several leading U.S. companies (DuPont, General Electric, General Motors, Gore, Ion Power, Proton OnSite, United Technologies, 3M) as well as international firms (Ballard, Bosch, Freudenberg, Johnson Matthey, Nuvera, SGL Carbon, Toyota).
To learn more about this year’s Presidential Early-Career Scientist Awards: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2014/01/07/president-obama-honors-outstanding-early-career-scientists/
To contact or work with Adam: azweber@lbl.gov