What I try to study are the elementary processes occurring in materials that are used in batteries and fuel cells.
A fuel cell is a device that takes in a fuel and burns it but without burning it. It actually converts a chemical energy inside a fuel into electrical energy.
I've got ions and electrons if you will moving around inside of there; how do I make them move faster, how do I make the reactions occur faster, how do I design materials to make those things happen.
We are at the cutting edge, really, of many aspects of the devices I just described. It's exciting research; great to play in that area.
People are pushing very, very hard, especially, I would say Toyota, Honda, GM are probably at the forefront in pushing to put these in cars.
At least one company will release a fuel cell car by 2015 if not sooner.
That is far and away the hardest application because basically the cost you pay for an engine is extremely low relative to what we can do right now with a fuel cell.
But as we scale up in manufacturing there's a possibility to really lower those costs to where it can be competitive. That's certainly what the projections show.
I think there are huge opportunities for students in this context; undergraduate and graduate students.
And basically the kind of resources that are at a national laboratory,
the kind of expertise that's around the national laboratory combined with
sort of the student body and the, sort of, excitable young minds that are at the university
you know, that could be golden.