About

Professor William Chueh leads the Chueh Group at Stanford University, focusing on the fundamental understanding and engineering of redox-active materials for energy storage and conversion technologies. His research addresses the grand challenge of storing and dispatching low-cost but intermittent renewable electricity, such as solar and wind, by exploring the efficient transformation between electrical, chemical, and thermal energy through organic and inorganic redox-active materials. The group employs a bottom-up approach that integrates novel synthesis, fabrication, characterization, modeling, and analytics to understand molecular pathways and interfacial structures, bridging fundamental science to practical energy technologies like batteries, fuel cells, and electrolyzers. Their work aims to establish new design rules that optimize metrics such as energy density, lifetime, and safety, which are controlled by phenomena spanning from atomic to system scales and from picoseconds to decades. The Chueh Group's mission is to develop energy technologies that utilize sustainably extracted materials, enabling significant reductions in cost and emissions, and to accelerate research and development to bring impactful energy solutions to scale more rapidly and economically. Professor Chueh emphasizes creativity, diversity, and inclusion as essential components of impactful research, fostering a collaborative environment that draws from diverse perspectives to fuel innovation. His group's research contributes to advancing lithium-ion battery technology, which is transforming mobility through electric vehicles and supporting electricity grids by storing intermittent renewable energy, while also critically assessing emerging technologies such as sodium-ion batteries and iron-based materials for their techno-economic competitiveness and energy potential.

Research topics

• Materials science
• Machine Learning
• Physical chemistry
• Chemistry
• Computer Science
• Nanotechnology
• Physics
• Chemical physics
• Chemical engineering
• Artificial Intelligence
• Metallurgy
• Medicine
• Pathology
• Reliability engineering
• Organic chemistry
• Engineering
• Computational chemistry
• Thermodynamics
• Inorganic chemistry

Selected publications

• Using engineering and economic analysis to drive technology development roadmaps for energy storage

  Stanford Digital Repository · 2026-03-16

  dissertationOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Eliminating lattice collapse in dopant-free LiNi0.9Mn0.1O2 cathodes via electrochemically induced partial cation disorder

  Nature Energy · 2025-11-27 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "Aging matrix visualizes complexity of battery aging across hundreds of cycling protocols"

  2025-04-16

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Tuning the f Band for Enhanced Surface Redox in Strained Rare Earth Oxides

  Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025-10-24 · 1 citations

  articleCorresponding

  ) are essential in catalysis due to their 4f band-governed surface redox properties, which influence crucial reactions such as hydrogen dissociation and water formation. However, correlating the 4f band structure with catalytic activity has been a long-standing challenge due to the complexities of manipulating and characterizing 4f electrons. Here, we demonstrate that tensile strain effectively modulates the 4f electronic structure, narrowing the band gap and activating surface oxygen, leading to enhanced redox activity. Using atomically flat ceria ultrathin films under up to a 7% biaxial strain range, we observed a five-fold increase in surface reaction kinetics via time-resolved ambient-pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Complementary density functional theory calculations reveal that the tensile strain reduces energy barriers for key catalytic steps by narrowing the 4f-2p band gap. These findings highlight the RE 4f electronic structure as a critical descriptor for catalysis and demonstrate the utility of atomically flat model systems.

  PublisherDOI

• Electrode strain dynamics in layered intercalation battery cathodes

  Science · 2025-12-18 · 8 citations

  article

  Rechargeable batteries using electrodes based on intercalation chemistry exhibit notable cyclability, yet their performance still suffers from chemomechanical degradation. In this study, by combining a suite of operando microscopy methods, we explored electrode strain evolution and observed intricate particle cluster rearrangement under electrochemical stimuli. We show that early-stage strain accumulation in intercalation cathodes occurs during the period of interparticle charge transfer and redox reactions stemming from asynchronous coupling and decoupling between chemical (de)intercalation and physical grain motion. This interplay drives heterogeneous redox activity, localized charge equilibration, and multiscale strain cascades that propagate through an asynchronous network of chemical-mechanical interactions. Together, these findings reveal how collective particle dynamics and hierarchical strain transmission dictate electrode deformation and degradation in intercalation cathodes.

  PublisherDOI

• Reducing the degradation rate and surface segregation of (La0.5Sr0.5)FeO3−δ electrodes in ambient air through multilayering

  Solid State Ionics · 2025-06-24 · 3 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Mathematical Model for Simulating the Charge-Discharge Performance of Aqueous Batteries

  ECS Meeting Abstracts · 2025-11-24

  article

  We present a mathematical model to delineate the complex electrochemical processes in aqueous batteries during the charge and discharge cycles. The model represents an aqueous battery cell by a one-dimensional continuum containing two interacting domains: a liquid electrolyte and a solid matrix. It accounts for ion and charge transport, chemical and electrochemical reactions (e.g., adsorption, nucleation, deposition, and dissolution) in the two domains or at their interfaces, and reaction-induced solid-phase morphological evolution. We validate the model by a comprehensive set of experimentally-measured charge--discharge curves for a wide range of aqueous batteries and cycling conditions. Our modeling framework provides a mechanistic tool for examining the underlying physical and electrochemical processes in aqueous battery cells, and designing high-utilization low-cost aqueous batteries for grid-scale energy storage.

  PublisherDOI

• Editors’ Note: The Rise of AI and its Role in Revolutionizing Battery Technology

  The Electrochemical Society Interface · 2025-06-01

  articleOpen access

  To capture how AI technology impacts the battery field, in this issue, we organized a series of feature articles contributed by experts who have applied AI technology to diverse aspects of batteries.

  PublisherDOI

• Two-Stage Growth of Solid Electrolyte Interphase on Copper: Imaging and Quantification by <i>Operando</i> Atomic Force Microscopy

  ACS Nano · 2025-03-17 · 7 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  The solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) plays a key role in the aging of lithium-ion batteries. The engineering of advanced negative electrode materials to increase battery lifetime relies on accurate models of SEI growth, but quantitative measurement of SEI growth rates remains challenging due to their nanoscale heterogeneity and environmental sensitivity. In this work, using operando electrochemical atomic force microscopy, we track the growth of SEI on copper in a carbonate electrolyte. From operando measurements of SEI thickness and irreversible electrochemical capacity, we directly visualize the dual growth regimes of the SEI, observing an early-stage primary SEI approximately ten times more “electrochemically compact” than later-stage secondary SEI, as quantified via the incremental thickness per charge passed. While primary SEI is responsible for about half of the irreversible capacity lost in a 24 h period, it accounts for only a tenth of thickness. We also show that nanoscale defects on the copper substrate play a key role in determining the nonuniform growth morphology of the SEI, thus providing direct evidence that initial SEI growth is not purely transport-limited. Our experiments reveal that SEI grows by two modes: first reaction-limited nucleation and growth of a dense, passivating primary SEI layer, governed by ion-coupled electron transfer kinetics; and subsequently by diffusion-limited growth of a porous secondary SEI layer, once the primary SEI fully passivates the electrode surface.

  PublisherDOI

• Aging matrix visualizes complexity of battery aging across hundreds of cycling protocols

  Energy & Environmental Science · 2025-01-01 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Data-driven interpretation of battery degradation visually summarizes the relationship between 16 state-of-health metrics and aging, facilitating users in simplifying large datasets and identifying key degradation regimes for further experimentation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Understanding Surface Redox Activity of Atomically-Flat Electroceramics

  NSF · $500k · 2015–2020

• Semiconductor/Mixed-Conducting-Oxide Heterojunction for Photo-electrochemical H2O & CO2 Splitting at Elevated Temperatures

  NSF · $250k · 2013–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Kipil Lim

  Stanford University

  51 shared

• Martin Z. Bazant

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  45 shared

• William E. Gent

  Stanford University

  42 shared

• Yezhou Shi

  Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource

  40 shared

• Yiyang Li

  Stanford University

  39 shared

• Michael F. Toney

  37 shared

• J. Tyler Mefford

  34 shared

• Devi Ganapathi

  Stanford University

  34 shared

Labs

• The Chueh GroupPI

  The Chueh Group focuses on research in [specific research area not provided in the HTML snippet].

Education

• Ph.D.

  Stanford University

• M.S.

  Stanford University

• B.S.

  Stanford University

Awards & honors

• Outstanding Young Investigator Award, Materials Research Soc…
• Science Award Electrochemistry, BASF/Volkswagen (2016)
• Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Camille Dreyfus Found…
• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry, Alfred P.…
• CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (2015)