Climate Actions: Electric Vehicles and Direct Air Capture Technologies
“Climate Actions: Electric Vehicles and Direct Air Capture Technologies”
Mihrimah Özkan
Climate Action Champion Professor University of California, Riverside
COP26 is the 2021 United Nations climate change conference that has just ended. Delegates nearly from 200 countries discussed about climate and global warming. Among the number of pledges signed, decarbonization of industry, phasing out coal, carbon capture and electrification of mobility are pointed as high priority mitigation efforts. While improving living value, comfort and convenience for humans, (that means more carbon emissions), deployment of carbon mitigation technologies is becoming even more critical. The use of renewable energy generation sources such as solar and wind, electrification of mobility may help towards mitigation of climate change. In this presentation, I will discuss about advancements in Li-ion battery technologies for applications in electric vehicles and Direct air capture (DAC) of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that can help to curb carbon emissions.
Dr. Mihri Ozkan completed her graduate studies at Stanford University and at UC-San Diego. She is a professor of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UCR and also a cooperating faculty in the Materials Science and Engineering Program and the Chemistry Department. Dr. Ozkan is a Fellow of National Academy of Inventors and Frontier National Academy of Engineering. She is the UCR’s first and only female engineering faculty received these honors. She is selected as the Climate Action Champion and Change Maker Professor of the University of California. Dr. Ozkan’s research group has been developing unconventional solutions for Li-ion battery technologies using sustainable materials and green chemistry with low power processing. Transforming waste glass and plastic bottles, biomass (mushrooms, sugar) and natural sources such as sand and diatoms into high grade battery electrodes are among her group’s achievements. Dr. Ozkan has 33 granted and 15 active patents in the area of advanced energy storage technologies. For her scientific and innovative contributions, she is selected as the most remarkable women of UCR by the UC Regents. Her creative research earned 56 scientific honors/awards. She published 183 journal papers and 155 conference proceedings. Her Google scholar citations is 11351, h-Index is 55 and i10-Index is 140. Her recent climate actions include: organizing symposiums, i.e. the lead organizer for the Climate Change Mitigation Technologies Symposium at the Fall MRS 2021 Boston meeting, highly accessed reviews (CHEM 2022) and commentary (MRS Energy and Sustainability, 2021) and invited plenary presentations about the Direct Air Capture technologies for CO2 capture. She is also the Guest Editor of the April 2022 issue of MRS Bulletin with a focus on “Materials for Carbon Capture Technologies”.