Prof. Dr. Sarbajit Banerjee

Sarbajit Banerjee, FRSC, FInstP, is a Full Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences (D-CHAB) at ETH Zürich and serves as Head of the Laboratory for Battery Science at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). Prior to starting his positions at ETH and PSI, he was the Davidson Chair in Science and a Professor of Chemistry and of Materials Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University. He served as the Executive Director of Reconfigurable Materials Inspired by Nonlinear Neuron Dynamics (reMIND), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the Department of Energy. His research interests are focused on the design of battery materials, elucidation of mechanisms underpinning electrochemical energy storage, electron correlated solids, electronic structure studies at interfaces, metastable materials, energy efficient computation, multifunctional coatings, and the development of synchrotron spectroscopy and imaging methods.

He is a graduate of St. Stephen’s College (B.Sc.) and the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Ph.D.). He was a post-doctoral research scientist at the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at Columbia University prior to starting his independent career at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2007 where he founded and served as the Co-Director of the New York State Center of Excellence in Materials Informatics. At SUNY-Buffalo, he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2012. In 2014, Prof. Banerjee moved to Texas A&M University as a Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering and was named to the Davidson Chair in 2020. His research accomplishments have been recognized by the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2009), the American Chemical Society ExxonMobil Solid-State-Chemistry Faculty Fellowship (2010), the Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (2011), the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society Young Leader Professional Development Award (2013), and the Journal of Physical Chemistry Lectureship (2013). In 2012, MIT Technology Review named Sarbajit to its global list of “Top 35 innovators under the age of 35” for the discovery of thermochromic ceramics that enable reduction of the energy utilization of buildings. He was named by the Institute of Materials, Minerals, and Mining (IOM3) as the recipient of the Rosenhain Medal and Prize in 2015 and was awarded the Beilby Medal and Prize by IOM3, Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Society for Chemistry & Industry in 2016. He was named by NASA as an Innovative Advanced Concepts (NASA NIAC) Fellow in 2021. He has received two separate Special Creativity Extension Awards from the National Science Foundation (2020 and 2021).

In addition to his research accomplishments, Sarbajit was awarded the 2018 Robert S. Hyer Award for graduate student mentoring by the Texas Section of the American Physical Society, the 2019 Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award by the College of Science at Texas A&M University, and the 2021 Stanley C. Israel Southwest Regional Award for Advancing Diversity in the Chemical Sciences by the American Chemical Society. He was named a Fish Camp Namesake by the student body at Texas A&M. He was awarded highest university honors in graduate mentoring in 2022. He has published over 250 articles and holds 10 issued US patents that have been licensed to three companies. He serves on the advisory boards of the research focus Energy at KIT and the PoLiS Cluster of Excellence on energy storage beyond lithium at KIT and Ulm. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute of Physics. He serves as Deputy Editor of ACS Omega after completing stints as Associate Editor and Senior Editor.