The Faraday Institution is the UK's independent institute for electrochemical energy storage research, skills development, market analysis, and early-stage commercialisation. At their recent annual conference, they presented a number of awards recognising the achievements of their research community.
PhD student Zoë Wright, who is part of the Energy Materials Group at ISIS and the University of Oxford, won the Poster Prize for Scientific Content for her poster: “Developing and Characterising High Power Layered Transition Metal Oxide Cathode Materials for Sodium-ion Batteries."
Zoë is investigating improvements in sodium-ion cathode materials by doping with calcium. She's using muon spin relaxation spectroscopy to provide a reliable method to determine activation energies and diffusion rates, which are good indicators of the performance of battery materials.
Isabel Antony is a PhD student at UCL on the ISIS Facility Development Scheme, jointly funded by Diamond Light Source. She won the Poster Prize for Research Progress & Findings, for her poster: “Neutron Imaging to Study Electrolyte Dynamics in Lithium-Ion Batteries."
The judges said: “Her poster outlined a new approach to silicon production for use in high energy anode materials. It demonstrated clear comparisons to existing commercial materials and included a strategy for commercialisation and scale up."
Isabel also leads the UCell outreach team, who won the 2025 Public Engagement / STEM Outreach Team Award. The team creates interactive experiences that allow participants to actively explore scientific principles. They take these activities to festivals including Cheltenham Science Festival, Glastonbury, The Festival of Engineering and the Green Man Festival, and even use in-house built hybrid fuel cell / battery devices to power aspects of the festivals, such as performance stages and charging mobile phones.
ISIS instrument scientist Gabriel Perez is part of a team, led by Louis Piper from the University of Warwick, who won the Innovation Award. This award recognises an individual or teams that has made a significant contribution via the development of an outstanding innovation.
Their group has pioneered X-ray methods to study industrially relevant pouch cells during operation in laboratory settings and extended the operando platform for deployment to the study of multi-layer cells at national facilities including Diamond Light Source and ISIS, including using neutrons. The insights the techniques have enabled have catalysed progress across multiple projects and shaped the battery development strategy of a number of large and small industry organisations.
You can read more about their innovative technique in the case study on the Faraday Institution's website.
The judges said: “This innovative research has been disseminated broadly and is internationally-recognised. It is a model of highly-collaborative, translational science that has forged new academic-industrial pathways and empowered the battery community with a diagnostic innovation with clear practical utility."
