Research Itinerary

My research focus has evolved from macroscopic material screening toward strictly deciphering the thermodynamic origins of charge transport. By exclusively adhering to measurable electrochemical observables, I seek to decouple complex interfacial variables—such as charge transfer kinetics and non-ideal transport behaviors—into precise physical models.

This transition represents a deliberate move towards providing definitive validations for transport and kinetic behaviors in highly non-ideal energy systems, bridging macroscopic observations with the underlying interfacial charge dynamics.

Because intercalation materials store charge inside the host lattice, the thermodynamic baseline moves while the measurement is being made. Our Viewpoint in ACS Energy Letters audited three widely used electroanalytical protocols against a simulated ground truth, and none of them returned the kinetics we had put in. Linear extrapolation to t = 0 overestimates the reaction overvoltage once the response turns exponential; time-readout at the EIS resonance flattens a non-linear signature into an apparent resistor; large-amplitude frequency-domain analysis reads a symmetric barrier (α = 0.5) as strongly asymmetric.

The obstacle is methodological rather than material: the community's disagreement over how intercalation kinetics should be modeled follows from how they are measured. Any scheme that corrects for the potential shift must assume a kinetic model beforehand, and in the highly non-linear Tafel regime even small errors in that assumption are exponentially amplified—so the kinetics one recovers end up restating the correction one chose. My present work is aimed at breaking that circularity by redefining the measurement environment itself, managing or bypassing local state evolution during charge transfer so that the kinetic parameters become observable in their own right.