Jennifer Rupp

Rupp was born in Germany in 1980.[1] Her mother was a language teacher, her father was a physicist and her aunt an active feminist.[2] She played piano as a child and struggled to choose between pursuing physics or music.[2] She eventually studied mineralogy and crystallography at the University of Vienna.[1] Her undergraduate efforts were recognised by the Austrian Chemical Society, who presented her with their prize for her diploma thesis.[3] She earned her doctoral degree at ETH Zurich. She was appointed as a group leader there in 2007, where she studied crystallisation kinetics in solid state ionic conductors and solid-oxide fuel cells.[1] She was awarded the ETH Zurich medal for PhD excellence.[3] In 2011 she joined the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, where she learned how to make oxide memristors and protonic fuel cells.[1] She left after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.[2] In 2012 Rupp joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked briefly as a senior scientist, and specialised in solid-oxide fuel cells and started to investigate resistive switching.[1] She worked with Harry Tuller and Bilge Yildiz.[1] Rupp returned to ETH Zurich and worked there until 2016. She was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation starting grant on materials functionalisation.[4]

In 2012 Rupp was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship on resistance switching memories.[2] Here she launched and directed the electrochemical materials group.[5][6] The group developed lithium batteries and solid-state thin film batteries for portable electronics, as well as investigating structure-property relationships in these energy materials including perovskites. She has focussed on solar to fuel materials, which use solar-powered thermochemical water and carbon dioxide splitting.[7] She has studied solid oxide fuel cells that can be incorporated onto a chip, and include .a free-standing membrane that separates a fuel from an air supply.[8]

Her contributions have been into electrochemomechanics; the interactions of the ionic charge transport, oxygen non-stoichiometry and membrane strain. She created a perovskite-based memristor in 2015, with three stable resistive states that can encode data as a 0, 1 or 2.[9][10][11] In 2016 Rupp demonstrated a fast charging solid lithium-ion battery that did not involve liquids or gels.[12] This can overcome problems of batteries igniting, due to thermal runaway, when the lithium makes contact with air.[13][14] The fast charging occurs because there is greater contact between the anode and the electrolyte than in conventional batteries.[13][15]

She moved back to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016, where she has worked on lithium ceramic electrolyte conductors for safe and efficient batteries.[16] At MIT Rupp works on solid-state materials for energy devices including solar cells and solar-to-synthetic fuel conversion. She is also interested in neuromorphic memories and computing logic.[17] She has delivered plenary talks at the Royal Society and Gordon Research Conference.