Alumna Kelsey Hatzell (PhD 2015, advisor: Yury Gogotsi) will be joining Vanderbilt in January 2017 with dual appointments as assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering Departments. At Vanderbilt her research will primarily involve understanding inks and interfaces. From the inks perspective she will investigate how materials interact, aggregate, and orient in a solution and how to control material properties during printing processes. From an applied sense her group will look into designing multi-component inks for applications related to energy storage, energy conversion, sensing and water desalination applications.
Currently Kelsey is an ITRI-Rosenfeld postdoctoral fellow in the Energy Technology Area at the Berkeley Lab. Her postdoc work has involved using novel soft and hard x-ray scattering techniques as well as neutron scattering techniques to understand the structure, swelling, and aggregation properties of polymers within a solution for broad applications related to materials processing ion exchange membranes for large scale energy storage and energy conversion systems.
During her doctoral studies at Drexel University, Kelsey worked in the Nanomaterials Group researching suspension or flowable electrode systems for water deionization and energy storage applications. This work received the 2015 Drexel Office of Graduate Studies Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award and was supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.