After attending Massey University in New Zealand as a Fulbright Scholar from 2002 to 2003, she returned to UC Berkeley to study the shape control and selective growth patterns of multimaterial heterostructures for catalytic and energy applications with Professor Yang, leading to a Ph.D. from the Department of Chemistry in 2008. Following a year of postdoctoral research on metal-semiconductor hybrid materials and the fate of nanomaterials in the environment with Dr. Taleb Mokari at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, she joined the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher. Her current research interests include the design of functional inks and development of solution deposition processes for photovoltaic materials.

An integrated computational and experimental study of FeS2 pyrite reveals that phase coexistence is an important factor limiting performance as a thin‐film solar absorber. This phase coexistence is suppressed with the ternary materials Fe2SiS4 and Fe2GeS4, which also exhibit higher band gaps than FeS2. Thus, the ternaries provide a new entry point for development of thin‐film absorbers and high‐efficiency photovoltaics.

All-solid lithium batteries are an attractive next-generation technology that use ion-conducting solids such as β-Li 3 PS 4 (LPS) to enable use of a lithium metal anode, which increases theoretical capacity and widens the stable voltage window over traditional lithium-ion systems. These ion-conductive solids also provide increased safety by replacing flammable liquid electrolytes. Although solid-state electrolytes are significantly more stable and dendrite-resistant than traditional liquid electrolytes, lithium anodes in all-solid systems may nevertheless grow dendrites under high stress or repeated cycling, leading to short circuits and premature battery breakdown. For this reason, we study the formation and propagation of Li metal features within solid electrolytes using synchrotron-based X-ray tomography with in-situ current-voltage cycling supported by our custom sample platform. Our results demonstrate the ability of this technique to delineate different layers of the Li/LPS/Li structure with spatial resolution approaching 1 μm. At this resolution, we are able to detect expansion of voids, especially in early stages of cycling. This expansion of voids is observed throughout the volume of the symmetric cells and visually resembles propagation of cracks resulting from interactions between the Li metal and pre-existing voids in the LPS electrolyte.

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