The Abate Group

Professor Abate’s group at MIT will aim at developing material and device solutions for two current grand challenges: climate change and energy accessibility. Global energy transition to renewables is indispensable to combat these challenges and ultimately ensure the continuity of life on earth. Electrochemistry and materials play one of the most significant roles in enabling the energy transition. The Abate lab at MIT is delighted to be part of this era, to stand on the shoulder of giants and make meaningful and impactful contributions to the society through materials innovation and novel electrochemical devices. To ensure for equitable and sustainable energy transition, our group will focus on discovering high-performance, low-cost, sustainable, and environmentally friendly materials.

Research Approach -- With applications mentioned above in mind, we seek and explore ideas to create new materials or engineer existing ones by manipulating their electron, spin, lattice, and orbital degree of freedom. We test these ideas using ground state and excited state calculations. Results will be used to design materials (both model systems and functional materials) and test with experiments (both at the material and device level). State-of-the-art synthesis techniques will be applied (e.g. solid-state synthesis and chemical vapor deposition), electron, optical and X-ray characterization techniques (e.g. high resolution TEM and X-ray methods both at MIT and Synchrotron sources) and quantum mechanical calculations (e.g. DFT, OCEAN and physics based high-throughput material screening).