Graduate student Stephanie Spence has been racking up the awards of late. Spence, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Prof. Feng Lin’s lab, submitted her Master’s thesis titled, “Tuning the morphology and electronic properties of single-crystal LiNi0.5Mn1.5O4-δ (LNMO)” for which she received the William Preston Master’s Thesis award in March. The award was presented by The Graduate School as part of Graduate Education Week. Spence was only one of two students across the university to receive a 2021 Master’s Thesis Award.

In June, Spence received a Best Student Presentation Award for her presentation on the same work at the A04: Battery Student Slam, a special symposium at the 139th Electrochemical Society (ECS) Meeting. The presentation was titled “Investigation of Tunable Properties in Single-Crystal LiNi0.5Mn1.5O4-δ Cathode Materials” and summarized Spence’s research tuning the structural, morphological and electronic properties of LiNi0.5Mn1.5O4-δ, otherwise known as LNMO, which is a high-voltage cathode material used in lithium ion batteries. In her studies, Spence used a molten salt synthesis method to tune LNMO and high-resolution nanodiffraction techniques to observe lattice distortions in an individual particle to understand the distributions of cations in the material and better understand relationships between different properties of LNMO. The award was sponsored by both the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the ECS Battery Division.

Congratulations, Stephanie!