Yess Award 2023: congratulation to the winner Raj Pandya!

Raj Pandya is doing a postdoc at the Cambridge University and the Kastler Brossel laboratory at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris.

His research centres around imaging charge dynamics in complex material environments. The goal is to push the time resolution, spatial resolution and chemical sensitivity of optical methods to gain an understanding of reactions universal to chemical systems (including batteries), e.g. electron transfer, solvation, ion hopping etc. At the moment, he is particularly focused on seeing how one can visualise electron transfer in oxide materials on ultrafast (fs-ns) time scales to understand some of the intermediates and non-equilibrium structures that are formed during the charge transfer chain in these systems. This provides not only a potential route to shutting down parasitic reactions in emerging battery materials but also a way to discover new compounds. A second avenue that he has just started to explore is understanding how one can use vibrations in a system to probe and control ion transport.

He will receive his award at the Batteries Event, on october 11th.