Events Calendar

Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar

Speaker: Ryan Kingsbury, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Researcher, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Talk Title: Accelerated discovery of precise ion separation materials

Abstract: Climate change, water scarcity, and food security are among the greatest public health and environmental challenges of our time. Emerging electrochemical technologies have the potential to help address all three by offering clean, efficient means of producing clean energy, purifying nontraditional water supplies, or recovering valuable resources from waste. All such technologies incorporate engineered materials that promote the selective movement of charged species (ions) in aqueous solutions, and their technical and economic feasibility is often constrained by how well those materials perform. Thus, advancing the state of the art of ion separation materials, such as polymer ion exchange membranes, is crucial to the development of sustainable technologies across the water-energy nexus. However, we lack the molecular-level understanding of ion separations that we need to rationally design new materials with higher performance. This seminar will describe our current understanding of ion transport phenomena in polymer membranes, identify crucial knowledge gaps, and highlight opportunities to advance the state of the art by combining experiments and atomistic simulations. Insights from this research will accelerate development of materials with more precise ion selectivity, leading to powerful new technologies for addressing sustainability challenges.




Biography: Dr. Ryan Kingsbury has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2019. Prior to LBNL, he obtained a PhD in Environmental Sciences and Engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was named a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and recognized with a Student Fellowship Award by the North American Membrane Society. Before graduate school he worked as a consulting engineer in the drinking water treatment field, earning a Professional Engineering license in 2013, and founded a startup company to develop a novel energy storage process. Ryan studies electrochemical technologies for clean water and clean energy production, with a particular focus on developing ion-selective materials.

Host: Dr. Amy Childress

Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/91873923659 Mtg ID: 918 7392 3659 Pass: 975701

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526

WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/91873923659 Mtg ID: 918 7392 3659 Pass: 975701

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Evangeline Reyes