Professor Gerbrand Ceder joins the faculty of Berkeley MSE as a Professor on July 1, 2015. He received an engineering degree from the University of Leuven, Belgium, and a Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991. Professor Ceder’s research interests lie in the computationally driven design of novel materials for energy generation and storage. He has worked for 18 years in the Li-battery field, optimizing several new electrodes materials and has regularly served as scientific advisor to companies and investors in this area. He has published over 300 scientific papers, and holds several U.S. patents. He has served on MIT’s Energy Council as well as on several DOE committees, including the workgroup preparing the Basic Needs for Electrical Energy Storage report. His awards include the MRS Gold Medal, the Battery Research Award from the Electrochemical Society, the Career Award from the National Science Foundation, and the Robert Lansing Hardy Award from The Metals, Minerals and Materials Society, as well as several teaching awards at MIT. He is also a Fellow of the Materials Research Society and serves as a Senior Advisor to Materials Genome Efforts for the General Research Institute for Nonferrous Metals and Shanghai Jai Tong University. He is a co-founder of Computational Modeling Consultants, Pellion Technologies, and The Materials Project, which provides computed materials property data to the research community.

Dr. Kristin Persson joins the faculty of Berkeley MSE as an Assistant Professor on July 1, 2015. She obtained her Ph.D in Theoretical Physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden in 2001 and received the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Early Career Award for Women in Science. She pursued a postdoc at MIT until joining LBNL in 2008 as a Staff Scientist. At LBNL, Dr. Persson leads The Materials Project, she is the Director of the 2012 BES-funded ‘Materials Project Center for Functional Electronic Materials Design’ and the PI of the Crosscutting Thrust of the recently launcheSet featured imaged Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) hub. Dr. Persson is also a PI of the Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies (BATT) program, she co-founded the clean-energy start-up Pellion Technologies Inc., and she is the recipient of a 2010 ARPA-E award for developing high-energy rechargeable magnesium batteries. Dr. Persson’s research has addressed phonon-related structural instabilities, structure prediction in alloys, pressure-induced spin transitions, alkaline batteries, high-throughput materials discovery, and dissolution of solids in aqueous media. The main focus of her current activities is materials for energy generation and storage applications.