Through the vast synthetic tool box of organic chemistry, chemists have the capability to tune the electronic, redox, and optical properties of π-conjugated molecules and polymers, which in turn can be used as the building blocks to develop materials for semiconducting applications, solar cells, and energy storage. In these materials, the nature of the molecular-scale solid-state packing arrangement dictates performance, rendering knowledge as to how materials processing impacts these arrangements critical.

Designing highly performant electrochemical devices, such as rechargeable batteries, requires an in-depth understanding of the electronic and structural processes at play during normal operation and potentially leading to performance degradation.

NextGen Climate Founder and President Tom Steyer will address both the urgency and the complexity of mitigating climate change, and his efforts to bring climate change to the forefront of America's political dialogue. In reports released last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) affirmed that we can no longer wait to address this very real threat. He will also discuss the importance of making climate change a priority for our politics and policies in order to pave the way for a clean energy economy.

Host: Materials Department & Materials Research Laboratory

The Institute for Energy Efficiency (IEE) Apprentice Researchers Program is hosted at the University of California, Santa Barbara, by the Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships (CSEP) at the California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI).​

Research in electrochemical energy storage is converging to target systems with battery-level energy density, and capacitor-level cycling stability and power density. One approach is to utilize redox-active electrolytes that add faradaic charge storage to increase energy density of  supercapacitors. Aqueous redox-active electrolytes are simple to prepare and to up-scale; and, can be synergistically optimized to fully utilize the dynamic charge/discharge and storage properties of activated-carbon based electrode systems.

The UC Santa Barbara campus operates as a city, including the infrastructure, utility distribution networks and building systems required to provide a world-class teaching and research setting. A number of demand-side management initiatives being undertaken on campus ensure that energy demand and utility expenditures are continually reduced as UCSB climbs the national and international rankings.

A wide variety of electronic and optoelectronic devices such as transistors, LEDs, lasers, and solar cells use epitaxially grown thin films of semiconductor alloys. This imposes a constraint of lattice-constant matching between substrate and film, if crystal defects such as dislocations are to be avoided. This has traditionally limited the use to only a handful of alloys in composition space. In this talk, I will discuss how one can access new alloy compositions for a range of optoelectronic applications while keeping dislocation densities low.

Perhaps it was the image of the dead seabird that had unwittingly ingested shards of plastic. Or the footage of the turtle precariously tangled in plastic netting. Whatever the catalyst, plastic pollution has rapidly evolved from a largely abstract problem to a clearly relatable horror. And with that, public opinion has shifted from apathetic to appalled, inspiring numerous calls to action.

Modern computing systems are plagued with significant issues in efficiently performing learning tasks. In this talk, I will present a new brain-inspired computing architecture. It supports a wide range of learning tasks while offering higher system efficiency than the other existing platforms. I will first focus on HyperDimensional (HD) computing, an alternative method of computation which exploits key principles of brain functionality: (i) robustness to noise/error and (ii) intertwined memory and logic. To this end, we design a new learning algorithm resilient to hardware failure.