ACS Publications Summit: Advances in PhysChem of Energy Materials

Noa Marom

Noa Marom received a B.A. in Physics and a B.S. in Materials Engineering, both Cum Laude, from the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology in 2003. From 2002 to 2004 she worked as an Application Engineer in the Process Development and Control Division of Applied Materials. In 2010 she received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science. She was awarded the Shimon Reich Memorial Prize of Excellence for her thesis. She then pursued postdoctoral research at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) at the University of Texas at Austin. From 2013 to 2016 she was an Assistant Professor in the Physics and Engineering Physics (PEP) Department at Tulane University. In 2016 she joined the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor. In 2021 she was promoted to Associated Professor. She holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Physics. She is a member of the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute (PQI) and an affiliate of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. Her achievements in research and in large-scale computing have been recognized by several awards, including the Sanibel Symposium Young Investigator Award (2016), NSF CAREER (2016), the DOE Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) Award (2017, 2018, 2019), the Charles E. Kaufman Young Investigator Award (2017), the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics (2018), The George Tallman Ladd Award of the CMU College of Engineering (2020), the ACS COMP OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (2021), and the CMU College of Engineering Dean’s Early Career Fellowship (2021).

James R. McKone

Dr. James R. McKone is an associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and music from Saint Olaf College and a PhD in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the faculty at Pitt in 2016, he was a DOE EERE postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University. Prof. McKone’s research group studies fundamentals and applications of electrochemistry, materials chemistry, and chemical reaction engineering with an eye toward improving environmental sustainability in the energy and chemical sectors. In 2013, he was the recipient of the Milton and Francis Clauser Prize for exemplary doctoral research, and in 2017 he was named a Scialog faculty fellow in advance energy storage by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. In 2019 he received the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from Oak Ridge Associated Universities and his research was featured in the “Emerging Investigators” special issue of the Journal of Materials Chemistry A. In 2020 McKone was named a Beckman Young Investigator by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Kirsten, and two children, Matilda and Eleanor.

Lauren E. Marbella

Lauren Marbella is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University. Her research group focuses on understanding the relationship between electrochemical performance and interfacial chemistry in devices for energy storage and conversion. Her research relies heavily on the use of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and spectroscopy to evaluate changes in material properties in real time to elucidate the chemical mechanisms underpinning degradation in Li and beyond Li ion battery systems. Marbella’s research has received numerous awards including the Cottrell Scholar Award (2022), the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (2021), and the Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award for Advanced Energy Storage (Sloan Foundation, 2019).

She received her PhD in chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2016, under the direction of Prof. Jill Millstone. In 2017, she was named a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge in the group of Prof. Clare Grey. There, she was also named the Charles and Katharine Darwin Research Fellow, which recognizes the top junior fellow at Darwin College at the University of Cambridge. She joined the chemical engineering faculty at Columbia University in 2018.