Achievement

Iris Rauda and Veronica Augustyn are MCTP fellows working on nanostructured materials for electrochemical supercapacitors. Both will graduate soon, and the theses they file will contain a number of overlapping chapters. Iris is a materials chemist examining solution phase routes to nanostructured supercapacitors. Her current focus is the coassembly of preformed nanocrystals into nanoporous inorganic materials by polymer templating. The nanocrystal building blocks produce materials that combine porosity for solvent diffusion, high surface area for fast redox pseudocapacitance, and electrical connectivity. Veronica is an electrochemist who studies the kinetics of redox reactions, focusing on how to build fast pseudocapacitive processes into materials. Together they have a series of papers, submitted or in preparation on optimized architectures for pseudocapacitors. Their combined expertise is far more than the sum of its parts, and it is the MCTP program that brought them together