People

University of Oregon

Prof. Paul Kempler, Associate Director

Biography: Kempler is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Director of the Electrochemistry Master’s Internship Program (EMIP). At Oregon he has developed state-of-the-art electrochemical technology laboratory courses integrating experiments in analytical electrochemistry and electrochemical engineering with coding in Python. His current research efforts include studying interfacial ion-transport processes and developing electrochemical technologies to assist global efforts toward deep decarbonization. In particular, his group is interested in electrochemical methods for producing iron for emissions-free steelmaking. Kempler has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (2020) where he studied the optical properties and gas evolution characteristics of microstructured semiconductors used to convert sunlight and water into hydrogen. He received a UO Sustainability Award for Research and Scholarship in 2023.

web: http://kempler.uoregon.edu 

email: pkempler@uoregon.edu

Prof. Gary S. Harlow, Associate Director

Biography: Harlow is a Research Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Oregon Center for Electrochemistry. His research focuses on a mixture of fundamental and applied electrochemistry with topics ranging from double layer structure to electrocatalysis and corrosion. He is an expert in synchrotron-based techniques, and particularly surface x-ray diffraction. He completed his PhD with Prof. Christopher Lucas at the University of Liverpool (UK) in 2016 in Physics. Afterwards he worked in the group of Prof. Edvin Lungren at Lund University (Sweden) as a postdoc and then as a researcher where developed his own electrochemistry course and co-supervised 3 PhD students. This was followed by a short postdoc in the group of María Escudero-Escribano at the University of Copenhagen. Prior to joining OCE he held a joint researcher position between Malmö University and the NanoMax beamline at the MAX IV synchrotron in Sweden.

web: https://harlow.uoregon.edu/

email: gharlow@uoregon.edu 

Dr. Fuding Lin

Biography: Lin is a Senior Lecturer for CH 691 and CH 693 and brings over 10 years of experience teaching industry-focused graduate coursework through the Semiconductor Masters Internship Program at the University of Oregon. Through this program he independently developed and taught a project-based Design of Experiment (DOE) course, managed a shared micro device fabrication facility, and initiated an effort to expand the laboratory facilities to meet a workforce shortage in the semiconductor industry.

email: flin@uoregon.edu 

Dr. Andreas Stonas

Biography: Stonas in an instructor for CH 690 (Numerical Simulations in Electrochemistry) and CH 692 (Electrochemical Engineering), and contributes to CH 694 (Applied Electrochemistry Projects Laboratory). He brings over 20 years of academic and industry experience in microfabrication, electrical engineering, and photoelectrochemistry. He has collaborated with UO and CAMCOR through industry research at Voxtel Inc. and Northwest Nanoworks LLC (where he served as president and CTO).

Prof. Melepurath Deepa

Biography: Deepa is a Visiting Professor for 2024-2025 and currently a Professor of Chemistry at IIT Hyderabad. During her tenure at IIT Hyderabad, she was the Head of the Department of Chemistry for four years and Dean Faculty for two years. Her present research focuses on Zn-ion and Al-based batteries, solution processed solar cells, electrochromic materials and dual-purpose devices. She has authored over 190 journal articles and has a h-index of 45. Deepa has been a recipient of the Dr. G.C. Jain Memorial Prize by Materials Research Society of India for the Best Ph.D. Thesis in Materials Science  in 2006, the CSIR Young Scientist Award in 2008, the NASI – Young Scientist Platinum Jubilee Award in 2010 and the B.M. Birla Science Prize in 2013- all in Chemical Sciences as well as the Faculty Research Excellence Award from IITH in 2020.

Prof. Matthias Agne

Biography: Agne is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry  and Biochemistry. The Agne Lab does technology-motivated fundamental research of energy and environmental materials using a combined theoretical, computational and experimental approach. Thermodynamic principles and microscopic models are used to build an understanding of complex behavior in solids, such as thermal, electronic and ionic transport, and targeted experiments are used to test our theories. In particular, we are interested in experimentally characterizing and theoretically describing atomic vibrational dynamics in order to develop predictive models of transport phenomena in solid-state battery materials, thermoelectrics, and superconductors. We also work to identify and mitigate thermodynamic driving forces for interfacial instability in electrochemical and engineering systems.

Prof. Mark Lonergan

Biography: Brozek is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a member of the Materials Science Institute at the University of Oregon. He studies redox processes of the “nanoscale gap” between small molecules and macroscopic materials. Systems existing on this size regime are widely pursued for tackling problems in energy capture and sustainable growth, and yet their intermediary behavior resists description by conventional concepts and tools. His goal is to investigate the fundamental properties of compounds that blur the distinction between molecules and materials, and leverage this insight for designing better catalysts and electronic/electrochemical devices. Brozek won the Davison Thesis Prize for his PhD work at MIT (Best Inorganic Thesis), won the ACS Division of Chemistry Young Investigator Award in 2016, and was a Washington Research Foundation Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow in Clean Energy

web: https://brozeklab.uoregon.edu/

email: cbrozek@uoregon.edu

Prof. Chris Hendon

Biography: Hendon is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a member of the Materials Science Institute at the University of Oregon. He directs a research team dedicated to materials theory and high performance computing. He is a leading expert in understanding the electronic and electronic properties of porous materials using density function theory calculations. He works in the Oregon Center for Electrochemistry to understand water dissociation reactivity on metal oxide surfaces for application in electrocatalysis and bipolar membranes. Hendon completed his PhD at the University of Bath followed by postdoctoral studies at MIT. His work has been cited > 8,000 times.

web: https://pages.uoregon.edu/chendon/

email: chendon@uoregon.edu

Prof. Shannon Boettcher, Founder and Advisor

Biography: Boettcher is a Research Professor in the Materials Science Institute at the University of Oregon and a Professor in the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at University of California Berkeley. His research is at the intersection of electrochemistry and materials science, with a focus on fundamental aspects of energy conversion and storage. He has been named a DuPont Young Professor, a Cottrell Scholar, a Sloan Fellow, and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. He served as a Senior Editor for ACS Energy Letters. His research has been funded by major grants from NSF (CHE, PFI, CCI, MRI), DOE (BES, ARPA-E, EERE FCTO, EERE Sunshot), and DoD ONR MURI. He has published over 120 manuscripts related to electrochemical systems, catalysis, and inorganic chemistry that have garnered over 24,000 citations and he was named a 2019, 2020 and 2021 ISI highly cited researcher (top 0.1%). He founded the Oregon Center for Electrochemistry in Fall of 2019 and was the Blavatnik National Award winner in 2023.

web: http://boettcher.uoregon.edu

email: swb@uoregon.edu

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Oregon State University

Prof. Xiulei (David) Ji

Biography:  Ji is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Oregon State University. His primary research interest is to elucidate the basic structure-property correlation for battery electrode materials for sustainable energy storage.  He has published over 115 articles, in journals including Nature Materials, Nature Chemistry, Nature Energy, J. Am. Chem. Soc., and Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., with over 18,000 total citations. In 2019 he was named an ISI highly cited researcher (top 0.1 %). He received a 2016 NSF CAREER Award and a 2010 NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship.

web: http://jigroup.chem.oregonstate.edu/

email: David.Ji@oregonstate.edu

Prof. Zhenxing Feng

Biography: Feng is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering in School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering and a jointed faculty in Materials Science Program at Oregon State University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering of Northwestern University. Prof. Feng is interested in finding design principles of various materials for energy harvesting, conversion, and storage applications, with a particular focus on the studies of interfacial processes in electrochemical systems using in-situ X-ray scattering, spectroscopy, and imaging techniques.

web: http://research.engr.oregonstate.edu/feng/

email: zhenxing.feng@oregonstate.edu

Prof. Dipankar Koley

Biography:  Koley is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Oregon State University. His team uses and develops a wide variety of electrochemical techniques  to understand the complex biological systems. His research efforts lie at the intersection of electrochemistry, biology and bioengineering​. For example, his team develops advanced electrochemical techniques such as scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM) to study  microbial metabolites in real-time and in three dimensions to elucidate the microbial behavior in the context of biofilm-related diseases (cystic fibrosis) and infections in/on biomedical devices (catheters, artificial heart valves etc.). His findings will ultimately inform the design of the next generation of smart biomedical devices.

web: https://www.koleylab.com/

email: dipankar.koley@oregonstate.edu