News – Solid State Ionics Lab@Westlake University

2025/11/17 Kaichuang successfully defened his PhD thesis! Kaichuang has been very productive and made great contributions to the understanding of oxygen exchange surface kinetics by using model thin film electrodes. He also benefited a lot from our collabration with the team from TU Wien. Congrats, Kaichuang!

2025/08/29 Yang successfully defened his PhD thesis! Yang did fantastic work in elucidating the role of ionic defects in OER electrocatalysts, with his thesis rated with highest grades possible. We are a bit sad to see him leaving, but wish him all the best in his new journey!

2025/01/23 We had the final group meeting (w/ some fun games!) before the Spring Festival break and a hotpot dinner afterwards. Wish everyone a happy Year of the Snake!

2024/12/10 We are happy to host Prof. Christoph Baeumer from University of Twente. We learned a lot from Christoph’s seminar and we discuss many exciting future collaborations. We also had the chance to show Chris the newly-installed tri-color NAP-XPS system at Westlake University as well as the beautiful West Lake: )

2024/11/25 Haowen successfully defended his PhD thesis! Haowen is the first PhD graduate from the SSI Lab. As the first PhD student joined our group, Haowen has done great work on the defect chemistry of nickelate oxides. Congratulations, Dr. Chen!

2024/08/23 Congratulations on Luhan’s paper getting published on JACS! In this work, we used combined operando electrochemical and optical characterizations to separate the bulk and surface processes of ion intercalation in transition metal oxides (TMOs). Read the paper here. In the meantime, Kaichuang has started his journey as a visiting student in Prof. Markus Kubicek‘s group in TU Wien. We wish him the best!

2024/07/24 SSI lab members attended the 24th International Conference of Solid State Ionics (SSI-24) in London, UK. Kaichuang gave a talk on his work of phase transitions and oxygen exchange mechanisms of PrOx. Qiyang gave a talk as one of the finalists of Young Scientist Award (YSA) and another talk on HT/LT OER. On the way back, Qiyang also visited University of Twente and met with Prof. Christoph and Yang (who is visiting UofT on CSC funding)!

2024/05/25 Qiyang wrote an invited NanoFocus article on ACS Nano on the pitfalls and principles of analyzing 2p X-ray photoelectron spectra (XPS) of 3d transition metal oxides. Read the article here. 相关中文公众号文章请见这里。

2024/1/19 SSI Lab members won several awards at the SoE 2023 Awards Ceremony! Kaichuang and Haowen were awarded the Suwu Scholarship. Jieping was awarded the Best TA award. Qiyang won the Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. Congrats to everyone!

2024/1/12 Kaichuang and Luhan won the best poster award at the 1st SoE poster competition! The Year of Dragon is just around the corner. We wish everyone a happy and prosperous new year.

2023/12/1 Our group had a fun one-day outing with our friends from Prof. Liang Lei’s group and Prof. Xiao Yang’s group. We also installed a new sputtering tool for growing metal electrodes.

2023/11/17 Congrats to Kaichung’s paper getting published on JACS! In this work, we show that the chemical capacitance is a sensitive probe of phase transitions in oxides. We further studied the mechanistic transitions of oxygen exchange reaction across phase boundaries. Read the paper here. On the same day, Yang is setting off for Europe! He is going to visit MESA+ Institute at University of Twente for a year. Bon Voyage!

2023/08/01 Congrats to Kaichuang and Yang for getting CSC fellowship for studying as exchange students abroad! If everything goes will, Kaichuang will visit Prof. Bilge Yildiz’s group at MIT and Yang will visit Prof. Christoph Baeumer‘s group at University of Twente later this year. Well done!

2023/07/05 Congrats to Ying’s paper getting published on ACS Nano! In this work, we designed a gradient of oxygen chemical potential for understanding quantitatively the correlation between electrochemical driving force and exsolution. Read the paper here and the news report here (in Chinese).

2023/04/04 The SSI Group members attended the 21st National Conference of Solid State Ionics. Haowen and Yang gave great oral presentations. Congratulations to Ying Lu for receiving the best poster award! We also had a dinner party after the conference.

2023/03/07 We have new group photos! Thanks so much, the Graduate Student Association of Westlake University.

2023/01/22 SSI Group members wish a happy, healthy and prosperous Year of the Rabbit to everyone!

2022/11/17 Congratulations on Haowen’s paper getting published on Nano Letters! In this paper we studied the protonation process of NdNiO₃ in details, and discovered a colossal lattice expansion upon inserting protons into the nickelate oxide. We also used a novel electrochemical device configuration for better understanding the proton concentration-property relationship. Read the paper here and see the news report here (in Chinese).

2022/10/26 We have organized online or on-site WEstlake Solid STate IONics Seminar (WESTON) since the summer. The invited speakers include: Prof. Yanhao Dong (Tsinghua University), Prof. Alexander Opitz (TU Wien), Prof. Chia-Chin Chen (National Taiwan University). We are going to organize more WESTON seminars in the future so please stay tuned! : )

2022/09/22 SSI Lab has finally moved to the new Yungu campus of Westlake University. Thanks every group member for a successful moving and setting up the new lab. We hope that our new lab at Yungu will be a place where everyone can learn, grow and have fun!

2022/07/22 SSI Group members enjoyed a fun dinner party on the hottest day in the year. Several lab members attended the online summer school on “research formalism of electrochemistry” organized by Xiamen University. It was a great learning experience and Luhan won a best poster award! Congrats!

2022/06/23 SSI Group members had a strong showing in the 2022 SoE basketball games!

2022/04/02 SSI Group members celebrate the coming of spring in Hangzhou by having a hot-pot feast! : )

2022/01/27 The past year marks the achievements from each individual of our SSI group members. We wish everyone a healthy, happy and prosperous Year of the Tiger!

2022/01/21 SSI group members finished our first field trip to Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF). The beamtime went pretty well and we were all very excited. We hope that we can come back to the SiP ME2 endstation soon to perform more AP-XPS experiments! : )

2022/01/11 We took the opportunity offered by the Graduate Student Council of Westlake University to shoot a set of family-style photos: ). We wish our collaborators, our colleagues and our friends a happy and prosperous Year of 2022 and the upcoming Year of the Tiger!

2021/12/03 We are honored to have Prof. Truls Norby (University of Oslo) visit Westlake University and Solid State Ionics Lab and give a Westlake Master Forum lecture on New Ways of Protons and Electrons in Functional Materials. Prof. Norby is the president of International Society of Solid State Ionics and an expert in proton-conducting ceramics and solid-state electrochemistry. We learned so much from discussions with Prof. Norby and we cannot wait to have him back to see our new campus!

2021/11/08 The SSI Lab members had a fun and thought-provoking evening event over food ordered from KFC (not very healthy, though : )). Qiyang shared his experience as a PhD student in Prof. Bilge Yildiz group at MIT (we also want to congratulate Prof. Yildiz on being elected as an APS fellow!). We also had group discussion on how to make the SSI Lab a better place that everyone wants to work and become productive and successful. We had quite a few good ideas and we will implement some of these ideas in the near future!

2021/10/28 The SSI Lab group members attended the Westlake International Symposium in Engineering (WISE) 2021. We learned a lot from Keynote Presentations given by Prof. Minfang Han (Tsinghua University) and Prof. Xin Guo (Huazhong University of Science and Technology) as well as invited talk by Prof. Donglin Han (Soochow University). The SSI lab members want to thank all the invited speakers, staff and volunteers for making this incredible event happen!

2021/09/18 We successfully organized the 1st “Old bottles” workshop with Prof. Xiao Yang’s group. This workshop series focus on how to bring innovative ideas to “old” industry and technology. Our slogan is “New Wine into Old Bottles” : ) We had four great talks from our group members and we really saw sparks and new ideas during the Q&A session. We hope to hold this workshop series regularly, with invited speakers from outside our institute in the future!

2021/09/10 Happy Teachers’ Day!

2021/08/22 2021 Westlake University New Student Convocation (西湖五期博士开学典礼). We have four new PhD students joining us this year. Wish them the best of luck! Look forward to the fun we are going to have on the journey of exploring the unknowns in the field of solid state ionics!

2021/08/10 We have invited Dr. Huaiyu Meng, the co-founder and CTO of Lightelligence, to give a Engineering Colloquium at Westlake University. Dr. Meng shared the technology and achievements on computing with large scale integrated photonics, and provided another angle outside of academic world. We surely learned a lot!

2021/07/01 Haowen and Yang attended photon science summer school organized by ShanghaiTech University/SSRF. They both won the Outstanding Poster Award with their beautifully crafted posters : ) Congratulations!

2021/06/04 Prof. Donglin Han from Soochow University visited Westlake University and gave a great lecture on proton-conducting oxides. We learned a lot on proton-conducting mechanism, effect of Y/Ce doping on transference number and various synchrotron-based techniques. We also held a mini-symposium along with Prof. Xiao Yang’s group.

2021/03/18 We are delighted to have Prof. Zhaoliang Liao from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) to give a seminar on oxide heterostructures!

2021/02/08 Happy Lunar New Year! Year 2020 has been quite an unusual year for all of us. Hope everyone will have a happy, safe and prosperous Year of the Ox!