Energy Storage Solutions for a Clean Energy Future

Thursday, August 20th 12pm – 1:30pm

Dr. Sean Lubner

Research Scientist & Seaborg Fellow

Energy Technologies Area

Berkeley Lab

Dr. Lilia Xie

Postdoctoral Scholar, Bediako Lab

Department of Chemistry

UC Berkeley

Every year the U.S. consumes one fifth of the world’s energy, or the energetic equivalent of 1 cubic kilometer of coal.  Dr. Sean Lubner will talk about what we use this energy for, why it is increasingly necessary for us to be able to store portions of this energy for minutes to days, and ways to improve energy storage technologies. Dr. Lilia Xie will share how she is leveraging modern nanotechnology to identify and develop novel materials that can enable better, more efficient batteries for everything from the cell phone in your pocket to grid-scale energy storage systems.​

Sean Lubner is a Research Scientist and Seaborg Fellow in the Energy Technologies Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBL). He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley where he was an NSF fellow, after receiving Bachelor’s degrees in Applied Physics and in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He spent two years as a postdoc at LBL and was awarded an early career LDRD grant. Sean specializes in modeling and measurement of nano-to-macro scale heat transfer and energy conversion. He has worked on a variety of systems including energy storage, biomedical devices, water desalination, electronic materials characterization, and solid-state energy conversion.

Dr. Lilia Xie is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently working with Professor Kwabena Bediako to create new two-dimensional layered materials with potential applications in next-generation energy storage devices and computational schemes. She earned a PhD in Chemistry from MIT, where she worked on electrically conductive porous framework materials while supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and an MIT Presidential Fellowship, and an AB in Chemistry from Princeton University. She has also served on the leadership board of the MIT Science Policy Initiative and worked as a technology analyst for the energy storage industry. She is passionate about catalyzing connections between scientists and society.​