Electrochemical Science & Engineering Graduate Program at the University of California Irvine
Authors: Atanassov Plamen 
Published: September 2023

The initiative to create an interdisciplinary program to train PhD (and in parallel terminal ME) graduate students in electrochemistry have been in circulation at University of California Irvine (UCI) since the Fall of 2018. Several “grass-root” meetings of faculty with sustained professional interests in the general interdisciplinary area of electrochemistry and electrochemical engineering involving faculty from UCI School of Physical Sciences (Chemistry and Physics & Astronomy) and Henry Samueli School of Engineering (Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Materials Science & Engineering, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering) have taken place and lead to an internal formal proposal to create the program. This process was additionally catalyzed by the transformation of UCI Advanced Power & Energy Program into UCI Clean Energy Institute, to include National Fuel Cell Research Center and Horiba Institute for Mobility & Connectivity. This initiative was indeed halted for practically three years by the COVID pandemics and is being revisited just now in the Fall of 2022. The campus wide initiative Electrochemical Science & Engineering aims to support building a strong academic discipline to serve as a science and engineering backbone for decarbonization of technology and economy. The general research areas are (listed below) are being supported by a series of graduate classes: Electrochemistry & Electroanalytical Methods (Chemistry); Electrochemical Thermodynamics & ElectrochemicalSystems (MAE); Kinetics of Electrochemical Processes (CBE); Electrochemical Engineering (CBE); Electrochemical Energy Conversion & Storage (CBE) and Solid-State Electrochemistry (MSE) – all of which have been taught in a given, pre-arranged sequence as electives in correspondent departments with an substantially overlapping student audience during 2020/21 and 2021/2022 Academic Years. New technical electives in the areas of Bioelectrochemistry & Bioenergetics, Electrochemical Sensors & Biosensors and Electrochemical Water Treatment Technologies are being prepared for the 2022/223 Academic Year by newly recruited faculty. The lineup of the curriculum and the segmentation of it into specializations will be discussed. We will also address the creation of professional (termina) Master in Engineering (ME) graduate program.
Research themes that will be covered by the program are practiced by some 17 faculty at UC: Electrochemical energy technologies, such as fuel cells, electrochemical sensors, electrolyzes, and batteries, use chemical change to produce electricity, or vice versa, and consist of catalytic electrodes and ion-conducting electrolytes. Ion transport between the electrolytes is often limited due to intrinsic properties of (often polymeric) ion-exchange membranes, or low-temperature conductivity of solid-state ionic materials. The next frontier in the science and technology of electrochemical interfacesis exploiting the unique opportunities offered by our emerging ability understand ionic and charge transfer interactions at nanoscale and to tailor both soft and solid-state materials structures to facilitate such interactions including in corrugated and confined structures. Electrocatalytic systems directly utilize electrical energy to perform redox reactions. The latter is essential to most chemical bond forming/breaking events and in energy storage and utilization reactions. Molecular electrocatalysis effort is focused on designing molecules with tailored active sites, predicted by computational chemistry, in order to achieve optimal energies in abundant metals. This further extends to bioelectrocatalysis by proteins and bioelectrochemistry of cells.