Asst. Prof Jamie NeilsonColorado State University’s Assistant Professor Jamie Neilson and University of Colorado Boulder’s Assistant Professor Aaron Holder collaborated to submit a research proposal for the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) this past November.  Along with five other teams, Neilson and Holder were selected for the Scialog: Advanced Enegry Storage team awards. Each team, consists of early career researchers who have not previously collaborated with one another. Each team was awarded $100,000.

Neilson and Holder’s project, Discovery of New Metal Nitrides for Divalent Cation Intercalation Systems, will have the goal to work on the predictive design and discovery of new, open framework, covalent metal nitrides for divalent ion insertion and solid-state electrolytes.  Holder’s team will perform “in silico” computational prototyping of new ternary metal nitrides while Neilson’s team will synthesize the predicted nitride materials and test their ability to de/intercalate Mg.  Discovery of these hypothetical new materials has the potential to enable new batteries with even higher storage capacity and power capability relative to Li-ion batteries, owing to the doubled charge of Mg ions relative to Li ions.

The awards stem from the first Scialog: Advanced Energy Storage (AES) meeting in Tucson, Arizona, Nov. 2-5, 2017 which drew 58 new Scialog Fellows, who are rising stars from U.S. academic institutions, and 10 renowned facilitators.

The conference yielded 35 competitive proposals, the most for any Scialog, created by teams of Fellows newly formed at the meeting. One of the goals of Scialog is to rapidly catalyze new collaborations, and members of each team are required not to have previously collaborated.

According to RCSA Senior Program Director Richard Wiener, “Research Corporation chose to focus on advanced energy storage because we believe this critical area of science requires major breakthroughs in fundamental understanding of electrochemical and physical processes that will lead to a new era of technological advance.”

Congratulations Jamie and Aaron!