Guest Speaker Ying Shirley Meng, Ph.D., Associate Professor Department of NanoEngineering University of California San Diego. Dr. Y. Shirley Meng received her Ph.D. in Advance Materials for Micro & Nano Systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance in 2005, after which she worked as a postdoc research fellow and became a research scientist at MIT. Shirley is the Zable Chair Professor in Energy Technologies and professor in NanoEngineering at University of California San Diego (UCSD). Her research focuses on the direct integration of experimental techniques with first principles computation modeling for developing new materials and architectures for electrochemical energy storage. Overview Developing Better Batteries: It’s not just about the science. High energy, long life, rechargeable batteries are considered an important technological opportunity to reduce production of greenhouse gases. Electrochemical energy storage is attractive because of its high efficiency and fast response time. Some exciting new possibilities for energy storage materials include gas electrolytes, Li/Na intercalation compounds and battery architectures. Our research goal is to combine knowledge-guided synthesis/characterization and computational modeling to develop and optimize new higher energy/power density electrode and electrolyte materials for rechargeable batteries that are on the scale of megawatt-hour instead of just picowatt-hour. These and other research directions are clearly important, but will raise new challenges both in the development and application of these technologies.