My professorship is Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry and my research focuses on electrochemical energy conversion materials and devices. For widespread adoption of renewable, intermittent energy technologies, various efficient and sustainable electrochemical energy conversion and storage alternatives are needed.  In my group, we contribute to this effort by investigating and developing in particularly electrocatalysts and electrode materials for such applications as polymer electrolyte fuel cells and electrolyzers, lithium ion batteries and supercapacitors. The core theme is reduction of the utilization of non-earth-abundant-elements without sacrificing the electrochemical device performance. As an alternative approach, strategies to increase the lifetime of the critical active materials is studied.

To achieve our goals, we aim to understand structure – activity – durability interrelations of the active energy conversion materials. Hence, our work covers material synthesis, material structural and electrochemical characterization and integration in laboratory-scale devices. This includes also post-mortem analysis of the active materials to investigate degradation mechanism. To obtain fundamental understanding on complex phenomena, we carry out these investigations in close collaboration with groups specialized in modelling and advanced structural characterization technologies.