“My Journey from UCLA to the Forefront of Battery Innovation” — Maher El-Kady

Batteries have revolutionized modern life, powering everything from smartphones to electric vehicles, but challenges remain in making them safer, more efficient, and sustainably manufactured. In this talk, I will share my journey from an international student at UCLA to co-founding Nanotech Energy, a company at the forefront of next-generation battery technology. My work began in UCLA labs, where we pioneered powerful lithium-ion batteries using graphene, a material known for its exceptional electrical properties. Over the last decade, I’ve led efforts to bring these innovations to life, advancing energy storage solutions for consumer electronics, micro-mobility, and data centers. With our new production facility in California, we are turning ideas into reality, driving the shift toward a greener and more sustainable future. This talk will highlight how my experiences at UCLA shaped my career and how scientific innovation can address global challenges in energy and sustainability.

“Exploring the Large Molecule Limit in Developing a Quantum Functional Group” — Haowen Zhou

Optical cycling center (OCC) functionalization has been proposed to be a promising method of bringing chemical complexities into laser-coolable molecules. However, as molecules grow larger, the increased density of vibronic states often interact with each other, and can become a critical failpoint in the optical cycling scheme. By combining high resolution spectroscopy and detailed theoretical calculations, we are able to disentangle some of these effects such as couplings between dfiferent vibrational or electronic states. In this talk, I'll talk a few examples and hope to provide some general guidelines in optimizing the optical cycling pathways with large molecules.

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Sponsor(s): Chemistry and Biochemistry