This month’s featured student is James Pastore, a University Scholars junior majoring in chemistry who presented a poster at the Sigma Xi regional northeast conference (April 9, CEWIT) held at Stony Brook for the first time; and at URECA’s campus-wide undergraduate research Celebration (April 27, SAC). James has been working since summer 2009 under the mentorship of Drs. Clare Grey and Lin-Shu Du in the Grey group, a trans-Atlantic research group linking Cambridge, England and Stony Brook, NY. Through the lab, he collaborates as a team member of the Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) and the Northeastern Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES) — a multi-institutional, DOE-funded effort being led by Stony Brook University, and including as partners Rutgers University, MIT, Binghamton University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at San Diego.
James’s project focuses on the conversion mechanism of metal fluoride nano-composites as positive electrode materials in lithium ion batteries. He is the only undergraduate in the Grey group, and has had to undergo a lot of training to perform complex NMR experiments – assembling coin cells with electrode materials in a glove box, learning how to process NMR and XRD data. As part of the research, he also works with collaborators at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) to interpret data and confirm experimental results.
Last summer, James presented at the 15th International Meeting on Lithium Batteries in Montreal, Canada (June, 2010). James attended Sachem High School East, Farmingville, NY; his long term plans are to pursue graduate studies in materials chemistry.
For the full interview/feature, please go to: http://www.stonybrook.edu/ureca/researcher-month.shtml
