Chris Li Awarded Air Products Graduate Fellowship
Most of the scientific research done at Penn State University Park is considered basic research, so opportunities for graduate students to experience the process of product development are rare. However, Chris Li, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Chemistry, had the opportunity to do just that this past summer as part of his internship at Air Products at their headquarters in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Li is the recipient of the 2015 Air Products Graduate Fellowship, which includes the summer internship, as well as one year of funding.
As part of his internship, Li worked on a research and development team at Air Products making a formulation for metal etching. “Basically, we were mixing chemical A and chemical B trying to make a formulation for etching targeted metal on printed circuit boards, which have layers and layers of different metals stacked together. I was involved in making that and then characterizing it with electrochemistry,” said Li. Although the process of metal etching was new to Li, electrochemistry is something he knows very well, so he was able to teach others on his team how to use it as a characterization tool.
Li’s internship was not his first experience in industry research. After graduating from the University of California, Davis, with a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering, he worked as a staff engineer at SiGNA Chemistry, Inc. on a team that designed and built a portable hydrogen storage battery that, when paired with a fuel cell, can provide portable electricity at remote locations for small electronics like cell phones and laptops. As part of this team, Li was able to see a product go on the market that had phenomenal performance, but he wanted to be able to understand how it worked in terms of the structure of the reactions that were occurring. It was then that he decided to pursue a graduate degree in chemistry to combine his engineering skills with understanding the fundamentals of physical science.
As a member of Dr. Tom Mallouk’s lab, Li works on designing energy application related materials, such as sodium ion batteries. Chris studies the diffusion coefficient of sodium ions using a technique called impedance spectroscopy, an electrochemical technique that he uses to probe a series of different structures of cathode material and compare the diffusion coefficients to get a structure-property relationship. The goal is to design a next-generation sodium ion battery with a faster diffusion coefficient that will make the batteries cheaper and just as fast, if not faster, than the lithium ion batteries we use today.
Outside the lab, Li is an avid runner, running seven marathons and one ironman race since he began running about four years ago. The time management and discipline skills required for this type of running, as well as earning a Ph.D., are ones that he learned as an undergraduate student as he worked all four years to pay for his own tuition and expenses. Li is the first member of his family to obtain a college degree and attend graduate school.