Sustainable Energy Storage – A Perspective and Future for Batteries

Rupp’s research broadly encompasses solid state materials for sustainable energy storage and conversion. Her research on batteries is currently centered on designing novel classes of Li solid state conductors, inventing cheap battery solid state synthesis routes for new hybrid and solid cell designs and defining cyber-physical battery synthesis and high throughput analytics. Other areas of research touch on the production of sustainable photo-generated fuels as well as implantable energy tech; she recently proposing with her team a first human-implantable fuel cell chip to convert glucose into electricity. She also enjoys exploring lithium-based devices beyond batteries, such as new “lithionic” concepts for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing opto-ionics and sensing. Most of her team’s activities are centered around green energy research and development, and Rupp maintains a strong emphasis on solving global problems through research.

Prof. Rupp FRSC (* 1980) earned her PhD degree at ETH Zurich Switzerland and was affiliated as a visiting and senior scientist at MIT (2012-2011) and the National Institute of Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan (2011). She was a non-tenure track Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich (2012-2016), where she held two prestigious externally funded career grants, namely an ERC Starting Grant (SNSF) and Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) professorship. In 2017, she joined as faculty MIT, where she was promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (MIT). Recently, she joined TU Munich in the Department of Chemistry as a faculty member as well as TUM International Energy Research as CTO, and keeps a visiting professorship at MIT.

She has published more than 125 papers, holds more 25 patents, and, being a frequent speaker and panel member of the World Economic Forum, enjoys discussing material tech trends on the theme of energy with the public, economists and policy makers. Rupp also enjoys engaging with companies all around the world through both consultancy and collaborations focused on material processing, business, and electrochemical device & product engineering (e.g. battery, sustainable fuel processing, sensing, electronic companies). Recently she co-founded the battery material manufacture company Qkera to translate CO₂ reduced solid state battery manufacture to energy storage products and serves as the chief strategy officer (CSO).  She is one of the few female advisory board members to battery ceramic material manufacturers and also the Bavarian state minister for energy and economics. She is an appointed Fellow of the Royal Chemical Society in the UK, IEEE Advisory Board Member for Neuromorphic Computing, and serves on the editorial board of Energy & Environmental Science, Advanced Functional Materials and other journals. Since 2017, she has served as the Associate Editor at the Journal of Materials Chemistry A. Through her career she has won numerous awards including the 2022 Samsung Special Recognition for Battery Work, 2017 BASF and Volkswagen Science Award for her battery research, 2018 Merck Award, and many others.

In 2019, she founded the LILA Mentorship program for Minorities in Engineering and Sciences as a small but necessary effort to bridge the ever-existing gender gap and foster diversity in future leadership in energy and solid-state chemistry/material R&D.