Interfacial materials for electrochemical and biomedical devices

Interfaces play a key role in many areas including electronics, energy conversion and storage, and medical technology. In this talk, I will first introduce the development of interfacial materials for electrochemical devices such as batteries. The significant increase in energy density of batteries must be achieved by exploring new materials and cell configurations. Lithium metal and lithiated silicon are two promising high-capacity Li-containing anodes. Unfortunately, both these anodes suffer from serious environmental corrosion during electrode fabrication and battery cycling processes. The interfacial materials with precise atomic compositions and tailored nanostructures realize Li-containing anodes with both environmental and electrochemical stability. The interfacial engineering approaches bring huge benefit to both the existing Li-ion batteries and next-generation Li-S batteries. 

In the second part, I will introduce the design of interfacial materials for transient electronics. Aside from environmental benefits, transient electronics find tremendous applications as bioresorbable implantable medical devices that obviate the need for extraction surgeries. The key challenge of bioresorbable electronics is to develop stable interfacial materials that can provide high-performance operation yet are completely dissolvable in biofluids and are fully biocompatible. By synthesizing barrier materials with optimized physical, chemical and mechanical properties, we develope biodegradable and wireless electronics with necessary operating times for therapeutic purposes, specifically as electrical stimulators to accelerate tissue regeneration.