2022-2023 Graduate Student Fellow
Faculty Advisor: Professor Kristin Persson
Current Position: Ph.D. Student (Persson Group)
Evan Walter Clark Spotte-Smith was born and raised in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland. In 2019, they received their B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Columbia University, where they performed research on nanoparticle self-assembly dynamics and thermochemical energy storage. Evan performed their doctoral research in the group of Professor Kristin Persson. They developed methods to interrogate electrochemical reactivity and applied those methods to understand electrolyte degradation and solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) formation in metal-ion batteries. Evan has a passion for mentoring young scientists, and they love cool rocks, smart animals, and tea.
As a Kavli Fellow, Evan employed density functional theory (DFT) and chemical reaction networks (CRN) to predict (electro)chemical pathways for electrolyte degradation in metal-ion batteries. Their work resulted in a new framework for performing microkinetic simulations at dynamic electrochemical interfaces and the first mechanistic explanation for gas evolution in Mg-ion batteries.