Advances in Battery Research 2025

Dr. Majid Keshavarz is the Chief Technology Officer at EnerVenue, where he leads the company’s product development team. With more than 20 years of renewable energy storage technology leadership experience, Keshavarz has extensive expertise in the technical and managerial oversight of research and development activities, and commercialization of electrochemical energy storage and material science. Keshavarz has played a fundamental role in the development of EnerVenue’s metal-hydrogen technology. He has led the development and testing of four generations of Energy Storage Vessels – the company’s differentiated, large format battery cell. His achievements include the discovery and implementation of innovations that have both reduced cost and improved performance. Keshavarz has also been instrumental in designing for manufacturability – a key strategic objective of the energy storage startup. Keshavarz obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For his postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Polymers and Organic Solids at University of California at Santa Barbara, he studied the chemistry of exotic materials such as Buckminsterfullerene, C60 and conducting polymers. He has authored numerous scientific publications and US patents.

Toney received his BS from Caltech and his PhD from the University of Washington. He was a postdoc at the Risoe National Lab (now DTU) in Denmark, where he participated in some of the first surface X-ray diffraction experiments. He then began working at IBM Almaden Research in materials sciences. He left IBM in 2003 to join SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford, where he initiated programs in sustainable energy materials. He joined CU Boulder in Fall 2020. Toney is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a Thomson Reuters highly cited researcher in Materials Sciences. He is a pioneer in the use of X-ray diffraction and small angle scattering for the determination of molecular and mesoscale structure of organic and polymeric thin films, for the determination of atomic structure of electrode-electrolyte interfaces and for operando observations of energy storage materials.

Jill Pestana is the founder and CEO of Pestana Solutions, a consulting firm that helps high-tech companies, especially in the battery industry, communicate their innovative technologies to wider audiences. With over a decade of experience as a battery scientist and engineer and 15 patents, Jill has consulted for start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. She also educates over 250,000 people on her YouTube channel, Across the Nanoverse, and is dedicated to building a sustainable battery value chain and clean energy future.

Dr. Boryann (Bor Yann) Liaw has four decades of experience in electrochemical energy conversion and storage R&D. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University in 1988. He was a Directorate Fellow and Department Manager at Idaho National Laboratory during 2016-2023. From 1989 to 2016, he was a tenured faculty at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for 27 years. He has been a visiting scientist at Sandia and Lawrence Berkeley national labs. He served as consultants for private companies and advisors for research institutions since 1996, when he started HPRL.

Leopold completed his education in engineering at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and the University of Cambridge, UK. His current research at ETH Zurich and Stanford University focuses on lithium-ion batteries and their decarbonization pathways. Addressing this topic at the intersection of technological innovation, economics, and public policy, he applies a mixed-method approach, including life-cycle assessment and techno-economic modeling. The findings of his interdisciplinary work are relevant for ongoing policy discussions on climate change and industrial competitiveness and have been published in leading journals such as Science, Nature Communications, and Energy Policy.