Postdocs

Ajay received her M.Tech in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology from Anna University, India, in 2015. Later she joined Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India, to conduct her PhD studies and her research work was centered around the design of electrode materials for Na, Al, and Fe-ion batteries. Alongside, she was involved in developing strategies to control the “shuttle effect” of polysulfide for Na-S batteries. She received her PhD in 2020 and then joined the Xu group as a PDRA at UCL in 2021, funded by the EPSRC New Investigator Award project.

Research interest: design, synthesis, and mechanistic study of electrode materials for post-Li-ion batteries, with special interest in Na and K battery chemistries.

Harry undertook a Chemistry undergraduate degree (2016), before pursuing a MRes in biomedical research, with a focus on cancer research (2017), at the University of Liverpool. From there he obtained his PhD in inorganic materials chemistry at UCL (2021), where he worked with Prof. Xiao Guo and then primarily Dr Caroline Knapp, investigating the combination of graphitic materials with inorganic precursors, to design electrochemical carbon composites for fuel cells catalysts and supercapacitor electrodes. He joined the Xu group as a PDRA in 2021 and is currently working on a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. 

Research interest: intercalation electrode materials and mechanistic study of Ca-ion batteries and hybrid Ca/K ion intercalation.

Pan received his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Wuhan University of Technology, China, in 2020. During his PhD study, he was a joint training doctoral student at the Northwestern University, USA, from 2018 to 2020. He began his postdoctoral research at the Northwestern University in February 2021 and then moved to Westlake University, China to continue his work. Pan joined the Xu group as a PDRA in 2023, funded by the EPSRC “Free-from” project. 

Research interest: K-S battery, S-Se cathode chemistry, separator functionalization and current colector modification for metal anode battery.