Richard R. Ernst Lecture

Prof. Dame Clare Grey

The 2025 recipient of the Richard R. Ernst Gold Medal is Dame Clare Grey. She is the Geoffrey-Moorhouse-Gibson Professor of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. She is best known for her application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to study batteries and supercapacitors, with highlights including developing NMR techniques to study batteries in-situ and utilising this to observe lithium dendrite formation. Among numerous awards Dame Clare Grey has won the Köber European Science Prize (2021), RSC John B. Goodenough Award (2019), Davy medal (2014), Günther Laukien prize (2013) as well as being made a fellow of the royal society in 2011 and was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 2022.
Dame Clare Grey is head of the Faraday Institution’s battery degradation project, leading around 10 universities and industry partners efforts into nickel rich cathodes for lithium-ion batteries along with lithium iron phosphate and anode less cells. These research efforts focus on materials with lower cost and environmental impacts then present lithium-ion technology while offering potentially longer cell lifetimes. She also acts as director for the EPSRC centre for advanced materials for integrated energy systems.
With very real impacts of climate change manifesting there is an urgent need to transition energy production to renewable sources along with providing sufficient electrical energy storage for these intermittent and diffuse power sources. As such Grey is also working to bring her research to market as a co-founder of niobium-battery startup Nyobolt. These batteries promise fast charging (<6 minutes) and long lifetime (>10,000 cycles), and has so far secured over 50 million pounds of investment. Such batteries hold promise for electric vehicles and other fast charge applications.