Prof. Laura Lander will give a talk on  “The Search for a Sustainable Battery” hosted by Prof. Masashi Okubo's Laboratory.

Speaker : Prof. Laura Lander (Dept. of Engineering, King’s College London, United Kingdam)

To join the online lecture, please see the information here.

Short Description:

The decarbonisation of the transport and energy sectors is an imperative step in our efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Here, energy storage devices namely lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) play a key role. They enable the integration of renewable energies in the power grid and facilitated the development of electric vehicles. However, while LIBs are indeed instrumental in decoupling our society from fossil fuels and move towards sustainable mobility and electricity, they come with their own significant environmental impacts incurred across the battery life cycle. To make the energy transition environmentally beneficial, scientists and battery manufacturers around the globe are intensively searching for a truly sustainable battery. In this seminar, we will discuss the origins of the environmental challenges of LIBs, how they can be identified using life cycle assessment, and future pathways towards the development of eco-friendly alternatives.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Laura Lander is a Lecturer in the Department of Engineering at King’s College London. With her research she aims to tackle the challenges of current energy storage systems and, ultimately, to develop high-performance sustainable battery devices. She applies a multi-scale research approach working at the interface between materials science and engineering including life cycle assessment and techno-economics. Laura obtained her PhD from College de France in Paris and later joined the University of Tokyo, where she was awarded a JSPS postdoctoral research fellowship. She then moved to Imperial College London as a postdoctoral researcher before joining King’s College London.