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For operational updates and health guidance from the University, please visit the COVID-19 Resource Guide.
To learn more about our spring term, please visit the Updates for Students page.
808 S.W. Mudd
Lauren Marbella bridges the gap between material design and characterization to create functional platforms for a wide range of energy-related materials, including batteries, catalysts, and optics. Her work integrates concepts from engineering, chemistry, and biology to generate new materials and monitor these innovations in real time within devices.
Specifically, Marbella is interested in developing new approaches to characterize amorphous/disordered phases, interfacial phenomena, and dynamic processes using in situ/operando NMR/MRI. NMR and MRI offer a molecular-level description of the structure and motion in complex systems, such as battery electrodes, flexible electronics, and smart glass. Uniquely, NMR/MRI measurements can be performed as the device is operating, allowing the correlation between atomic-scale processes and macroscopic performance output. These new insights provide the basis to reimagine and achieve new technologies for fields ranging from energy storage to chemical production – for example, the development of safe, high energy density wearables as well as the improvement of selectivity in heterogeneous catalysts.
Marbella received a BS in biochemistry from Duquesne University in 2009 and a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2016 under the direction of Prof. Jill Millstone. She was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and the Charles and Katharine Darwin Research Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Clare Grey, FRS, at the University of Cambridge from 2016-2018. In July 2018, she joined the Chemical Engineering faculty at Columbia University.