Martin Z. Bazant

For years, Martin Bazant felt uneasy calling himself a chemical engineer. To be clear, Bazant has been a member of the faculty at MIT in the Department of Chemical Engineering for more than 15 years, four of which he served as the Executive Officer of the department. He has won the Kuznetsov Prize in Theoretical Electrochemistry (ISE) and the Acrivos Award in Chemical Engineering (AIChE), and he is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the International Society of Electrochemistry, the Electrochemical Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He also serves as President of the International Electrokinetics Society, and he is the Chief Scientific Advisor for Saint-Gobain Research North America.

Trained as a physicist at Harvard University, Bazant joined the Institute's faculty in Mathematics in 1998. While working in the math department, he launched his first startup in electro-microfluidics, which influenced his decision to move his primary appointment to Chemical Engineering. “The experience of going from a pencil-and-paper calculation to a technological application, and ultimately launching a startup to commercialize that technology, was a real catalyst for me in my career to realize that I'd like to move to engineering,” says Bazant.

These days, Bazant is particularly focused on lithium-ion batteries. In addition to leading his own research laboratory at MIT, he is the Director of the Center for Data-Driven Design of Lithium-Ion Batteries (D3BATT). With support from the Toyota Research Institute, Bazant and his team of researchers have been working with large data sets from electrochemical, thermal, acoustic, and image-based measurements, such as x-ray microscopy and x-ray diffraction patterns, which can be used to characterize batteries and develop accurate predictive models. “We are now on the verge of being able to do quantitative, quantum mechanical prediction of electrochemical reaction rates, which has always been a more empirical black art,” he says. “By understanding the reaction mechanism, we can engineer batteries to operate faster and last longer.”

Digging into the fundamentals of lithium-ion batteries has led Bazant to what he refers to as “an acute awareness that current battery technologies may not be sustainable.” He points to supply chain and cost issues around nickel, cobalt, and lithium. Given that a strong motivating factor for the electrification of transportation and industry is the reduction of carbon emissions, sustainability is essential. “Beyond optimizing for short-term performance, we need to start switching to using batteries and designing battery systems to be sustainable,” says Bazant. For example, we want electric vehicles to charge quickly, drive a long distance before recharging, and last a long time. However, we also need to design batteries so that the critical minerals in them can be reused or recycled. This is just one of the many issues that Bazant has been addressing as the Director of The Center for Battery Sustainability, an industry consortium that he founded in 2021. At the Center, which is a collaboration between MIT and Northeastern University, Bazant and his colleagues are tackling key challenges like battery recycling and lifetime extension while exploring creative ways to make better use of the materials currently at our disposal.

Beyond optimizing for short-term performance, we need to start switching to using batteries and designing battery systems to be sustainable

In fact, Bazant’s latest startup emerged as a result of his interest in lithium-ion battery recycling and mineral recovery. Well aware of the need for more economical and sustainable methods of producing lithium, Bazant and his former student, Mohammad Alkhadra, founded Lithios in 2022. They invented a process of Advanced Lithium Extraction (ALE) to separate lithium from brines (solutions that contain, among other dissolved salts, small quantities of lithium). Bazant says the general idea behind the process builds on prior art using Lithium-ion battery electrodes to extract lithium from brines in the lab. But nobody has been able to successfully design a complete electrochemical system and scale it for commercial projects that aim to produce thousands of tons of lithium per year—until now. Lithios initially found a home at The Engine, MIT’s startup incubator for tough tech, and after hiring MIT researchers and business school students to build the team, the MIT-connected startup is ready to move to their own facility off campus.

Reflecting on his journey from mathematician to chemical engineer and business founder, Bazant says, “MIT is unique in terms of its ability to nurture innovation aimed at industrial applications. We are academics, and we do want to publish great papers and make scientific discoveries. But we also want to make a difference in the world. That has been the story of my career: I began in math and ultimately moved to chemical engineering because I wanted to see all that science and math really connected to real-world problems.” For the record, Bazant is now comfortable referring to himself as a chemical engineer.