Andrew Shah successfully defended his PhD thesis on modification of membranes and electrodes for Vanadium redox flow batteries in June and started working at Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Michigan. Andrew was a recipient of the Austin Hooey Graduate Research Excellence Recognition Award in December, 2018 which is awarded to the best PhD student of the year in Chemical Engineering at Cornell to recognize outstanding performance in thesis work and excellent service to the department.

Ghazal Shoorideh started working at Apple and she will come back in January to have her PhD thesis defense. Our senior PhD students, Shubham Pinge and Mounica Divvela, both accepted offers from Intel, and will start working in January and in May, respectively.

Willy Halim, Snatika Sarkar and Rui Zhang defended their MS thesis this spring, summer and fall, respectively. Willy started working at SF Motors, and Snatika works at Conamix. Travis O’Neil, 2nd year MS student, accepted an offer from Edison Engineering Development Program at GE and he will start working at Global Research Center in Niskayuna, NY.

Five first year MS students in the department, Meichun An, Nicole Huang, Jasper Qiu, Avinash Umasankan, and Caspar Yi joined the group. Meichun started working on inclusion of graphene nanoribbon in silicon-graphene hybrid anodes, and Nicole works on non-flammable, high rate polymer-ceramic hybrid separators for Li-ion batteries. Jasper started working on mesocale modeling of line space patterns based on directed self assembly of block copolymer lithography. Avinash works on the tailoring polymeric binder in silicon/graphene electrodes, while Caspar is studying the layer-on-layer approach of sulfur infiltrated mesoporous carbon and graphene for Li-sulfur batteries .