Stanford Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship program introduces nine new fellows

Stanford University welcomes nine energy-focused postdoctoral scholars as the second cohort of its Stanford Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship. The program is run by the Precourt Institute for Energy, with support from Stanford’s TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, Bits & Watts Initiative, and StorageX Initiative, and from several philanthropists.

The recent PhD graduates arrive from nine different universities and from six home countries over three continents. Five of the incoming energy fellows are women, and four are men. Between the first two cohorts of Stanford Energy fellows, 83% of the 17 fellows are international, and 41% identify as non-male.

The objects of the newest cohort’s sustainable energy research at Stanford are also diverse, ranging from technological solutions to adapting to climate change. Their mentors are in 16 different academic departments. In addition to faculty members, scientists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and at Carnegie Institution for Science's two departments at Stanford – Plant Science and Global Ecology – also mentor these early-career scholars.

“This fellowship is designed to identify, cultivate, and connect the next generation of pioneers in search of sustainable energy for all people,” said Yi Cui, the program’s founder and faculty director. “Each of these postdocs are working on projects that may lead us in promising new directions in technology, research, analysis, and policy.”

Successful candidates emerge through a demanding, competitive process. Each potential fellow must be nominated by at least two Stanford researchers from different disciplines to be their co-mentors, among other requirements. The program’s faculty advisory board, led by Nobel laureate and former U.S. secretary of energy, Steven Chu, selects the successful candidates following a rigorous interview process. 

“Congratulations to each of our new fellows. We’re excited to welcome you to campus and to the Stanford energy ecosystem,” said William Chueh, faculty director of the Precourt Institute. “As you get to know each other, members of the first cohort, and our fellows’ Stanford mentors, we hope that the multidisciplinary nature of our program will provide you with new insights on how to solve the energy challenges you take on.”

The fellowship covers full living and professional costs for three years, one year longer than most postdoctoral programs. This extra year affords fellows the opportunity to mine a new research vein that diverges from their PhD work.

Aspiring scholars interested in forming next year’s cohort of energy postdoctoral fellowships are encouraged to apply now. The deadline for applications is Oct. 1. Third cohort fellows will begin their term between July 1 and Sept. 1, 2025.

Building a community

The new postdocs will research various energy-related topics. These include biofuels, hydrogen production, climate adaptation, new battery designs, a modern electricity grid, energy-efficient AI, and airborne methane, which is one of the more egregious of the greenhouse gases.

“These fellows come with a broad range of expertise in fields stretching from advanced microscopy and engineering to data science and economics. In common, though, they now pursue solutions for the global energy transition through interdisciplinary research,” said Audrey Yau, the fellowship’s director. “We look forward to seeing how their work grows through faculty mentorship, engagement with their peers, and exposure to novel, interdisciplinary ways of thinking.”

The fellows join a broad sustainability-minded scientific community at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, of which the Precourt Institute and its many programs are a significant segment. This sense of community is critical to the fellows’ success, Yau said. The fellowship hosts monthly “lab crawls” where fellows visit other fellows’ research spaces to learn about their studies, as well as regular leadership lunches where fellows learn from the lived experiences of leaders in their field. The program also organizes social activities for fellows and their mentors, and it offers a professional development program as a springboard to what comes after the fellowships are complete. 

“This second cohort, just as the first, can put their stamp on this fellowship, which we expect to contribute significantly to the clean energy transition around the world for decades,” said Yau. “The 2025 cohort will also help define this program’s culture of collaboration and early history of high-impact research.”

Meet the 2024 fellows

Liat Adler is in the very challenging pursuit of biofuels from algae. Some algae can use the energy from light to produce hydrocarbon oils. A barrier to harvesting that sustainable fuel: the production of oil is limited by energy delivery from photosynthesis and is too low to be economically viable. Adler’s energy fellowship will look to boost algae productivity by tweaking how they convert light into chemical energy, potentially doubling oil output. Adler completed her PhD studying algal photosynthesis at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Adler is advised by Matthias Garten in Stanford’s Departments of Microbiology and of Bioengineering, as well as Adrien Burlacot and Arthur Grossman, both of Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology.

Every time you scroll through your phone or browse the internet on your computer, there is a high chance that there is an artificial intelligence (AI) behind what you see on the screen—and it's using a lot of energy. Fabia F. Athena studies emerging materials and devices that aim to lead us toward low-power AI hardware. Athena’s research will explore fabricating emerging semiconductor devices at low temperatures for energy-efficient computer logic and memory, supporting low-power AI systems. That would align this great technological progress with sustainability. Athena earned her PhD in electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech studying energy-efficient emerging materials for brain-inspired computing. Athena is advised by H.-S. Philip Wong in electrical engineering, and Alberto Salleo in materials science and engineering.

Cong Chen studies how distributed energy resources – like rooftop solar, electric vehicles, home batteries, heat pumps, and HVAC systems – can be aggregated to support an electric grid increasingly reliant on intermittent supplies, like wind and solar power. In her fellowship, Chen’s focus will be threefold: equitable and efficient energy dispatch and pricing, understanding energy customers' preference, and improving power grid resilience. She recently earned her Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Cornell University studying power system engineering, optimization theory, and power system economics. Chen is advised by Kuang Xu and Omer Karaduman at the Graduate School of Business and Itai Ashlagi in management science and engineering.

Elemental sulfur, usually considered an industrial byproduct, could speed the shift from liquid to solid-state batteries while driving down costs. But there are technical challenges standing in the way. Yukio Cho will center on the molecule-by-molecule construction of atomic-scale interfaces inside these solid-state batteries to prevent degradation and boost redox kinetics. A material chemist, Cho has a special interest in nanomaterials and electrochemical applications. During his doctoral studies at MIT, Cho used a similar self-assembly platform to create a novel nanomaterial with remarkable stability and robustness for use in recyclable batteries and one-dimensional nanocatalysts. Cho will be advised by Stacey Bent in chemical engineering and Jagjit Nanda at SLAC.

Xinyu Dou studies methane emissions monitoring. She earned her PhD at Tsinghua University exploring how global greenhouse gas emissions are evolving in response to the energy transition and their correlated climatic implications. While at Tsinghua, Dou helped develop the world’s first nearly real-time, grid-level carbon emissions database. Her overarching goal is to improve such systems. By using satellite monitoring of key communities and through machine learning that can generate insights from vast emissions datasets, such monitoring could guide policy decisions and technological advances. Dou is advised by faculty members Rob Jackson in Earth systems science and Adam Brandt in energy science and engineering.

Kieran Orr will research highly conductive solid electrolytes to replace the harmful and flammable liquid electrolytes currently used in batteries. The precise ion transport mechanisms in solid electrolytes are poorly understood, so, in his fellowship, Orr will employ SLAC’s X-ray diffraction capabilities to develop atomic-scale, real-time structural probes to understand exactly how ions move through solid electrolytes. Previously, at the University of Cambridge, Orr used techniques to understand how strain affects halide perovskite materials used in solar energy, lighting, and detector technologies. Orr will be advised by Aaron Lindenberg in materials science and engineering and in photon science at SLAC, William Chueh in materials science and engineering, energy science and engineering, and photon science, and David Reis in applied physics and photon science.

Lisa Rennels works at the intersection of economics and computer science, researching the economic impacts of climate change, climate policy, and decision-making under uncertainty. She focuses on integrated assessment modeling and how bringing a rigorous treatment of uncertainty and risk to these models informs, and complicates, economic analysis for policy. In her fellowship, Rennels will focus on impacts to human health and building software for climate change research. She earned her PhD in Energy and Resources at UC-Berkeley. At Stanford, Rennels will be advised by Inês Azevedo in energy science and engineering and Marshall Burke in environmental social sciences. 

Microscopes have long been essential tools for exploring material at small scales, driving significant advancements in energy technologies. However, optical microscopy technologies capable of observing down to the single-ion level are yet to be developed. Yecun Wu’s fellowship aims to address this gap by employing quantum sensors to optically capture and visualize the behaviors of individual ions, providing deeper insights into the complex physics and chemistry of batteries and other sustainable energy systems. Wu earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford in 2023, where he studied two-dimensional materials for use in quantum and energy applications. Wu will be advised by Steven Chu in physics and in energy science and engineering, and Yi Cui in materials science and engineering, energy science and engineering, and photon science.

Zisheng Zhang did his doctoral work at UCLA in theoretical and computational chemistry where he advanced models for dynamic restructuring catalyst surfaces. Catalysis is key in energy conversion and storage, and for other environmental and green chemistry applications. Developing high-performance electrocatalysts that do not use noble metals is especially desirable for sustainability and scalability. Zhang thinks that boride, a compound of Earth-abundant boron and various metals, could be an exceptional electrocatalyst. He has dedicated his fellowship to developing and applying computational models to understand and design mixed boride electrocatalysts for applications in hydrogen evolution, nitrogen reduction, and other important reactions. Zhang will be advised by Thomas Jaramillo in chemical engineering, energy science and engineering, and photon science, and Frank Abild-Pedersen at SLAC.

Cui is also faculty director of the Sustainability Accelerator at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, co-director of the Precourt Institute's StorageX Initiative, past director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, and senior fellow at the Precourt Institute and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Chu is also professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford School of Medicine. Bent is also Stanford's vice provost for graduate education and postdoctoral affairs. Jackson is a senior fellow at the Precourt and Woods institutes. Brandt is also director of the Precourt Institute's Natural Gas Initiative. Reis is also director of the Stanford PULSE Institute. Azevedo is co-director of Precourt's Bits & Watts Initiative. Burke is also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the Woods Institute, and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). Jaramillo is also director of the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science & Catalysis, where Abild-Peterson is the co-director.

The Precourt Institute is part of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.