One of the most important challenges facing the world today is energy storage.  

 Renewable energies have become more accessible but harnessing their full potential for consumers’ use requires technologies such as batteries and fuel cells. Regardless of the device type, the efficiency of ion dynamics is crucial for its operation. Our work aims for the improvement of these and similar devices by fundamentally characterizing the ions and molecules’ structure and dynamics in potential electrolytic materials. We also aim to develop new and novel electrolytes. Within this framework, we work on various electrolytic materials including gels, liquids, polymers, ionic liquids (ILs) and IL analogues or deep eutectic solvents (DESs).  

The focus of our work is to explore and discover the fundamental guiding principles for dynamics behaviors in application specific materials. Having a deeper understanding will aid us and other researchers with developing new and better materials. Towards this focus we synthesize in-house many of the materials that we study. Our current work has a heavy emphasis on deep eutectic solvents (DESs), especially metallic salt ones. We like these materials mainly because they are easy to make and offer tunable physiochemical properties. We are also heavily invested in designing thin films because they offer a wide variety of applications including as separation membranes and electrolytes. We synthesize these thin films in house through the electrospinning method.