Gerbrand Ceder is a Belgian–American scientist who is the Daniel M. Tellep Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at University of California, Berkeley.^[1][2] He has a joint appointment as a senior faculty scientist in the Materials Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is notable for his pioneering research in high-throughput computational materials design, and in the development of novel lithium-ion battery technologies. He is co-founder of the Materials Project, an open-source online database of ab initio calculated material properties, which inspired the Materials Genome Initiative^[3] by the Obama administration in 2011. He is also the Founder and CTO of Pellion Technologies (previously CEO), which aims to commercialize magnesium-ion batteries. In 2017 Gerbrand Ceder was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering, "For the development of practical computational materials design and its application to the improvement of energy storage technology."^[4]

Career

Gerbrand Ceder received an engineering degree in Metallurgy and Applied Materials Science from the KU Leuven, Belgium, in 1988, and a Ph.D. in materials science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991, at which time he joined the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was the R.P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 25 years, after which he moved back to the U. C. Berkeley, where he remains. His research group focuses on the use of computational modeling to design novel materials for energy generation and storage, including battery cathodes, hydrogen storage materials, thermoelectrics, and electrodes for solar photoelectrochemical water-splitters. His group also designs, synthesizes and characterizes novel lithium-ion and sodium-ion battery chemistries. He has published over 400 scientific papers in the fields of alloy theory, oxide phase stability, high-temperature superconductors, Li-battery materials, machine learning, and theory of materials synthesis, and holds 25 current or pending U.S. patents.

In 2009, ByungWoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder demonstrated that the lithium ion battery cathode material LiFePO4 could undergo ultrafast charging and discharging (~10 sec full discharge).^[5]

Research

Autonomous Materials Discovery

In November of 2023, Ceder and colleagues introduced A-Lab, an autonomous laboratory for inorganic powder synthesis, integrating computations, machine learning, and robotics.^[7] The work garnered significant attention^[8][9] based on the claim it successfully synthesized 41 out of 58 novel compounds, primarily oxides and phosphates, over 17 days. The A-lab used graph neural networks trained on computational materials databases and literature-trained natural language models for initial synthesis recipe proposals, optimized through active learning based on thermodynamics.

In January of 2023, a preprint^[10] lead by Robert Palgrave and Leslie Schoop, critiqued the A-Lab results. The preprint scrutinized the accuracy of autonomous material discovery methods used in Szymanski et al. paper.^[7] They argue the initial claim of 43 new materials via A-lab, faces issues with automated Rietveld analysis in X-ray diffraction and neglected material disorder, leading to Palgrave et al.'s conclusion hat no new materials were discovered.^[10] The preprint stresses the need for improved approaches to using AI tools and computational models. Prior to the preprint criticism by Palgrave online^[11] was addressed by Ceder in a LinkedIn post refuting many critiques made against the A-lab paper.

Awards

In 2009, he was awarded the Materials Research Society (MRS) Gold Medal "For pioneering the high-impact field of first-principles thermodynamics of batteries materials and for the development of high-power density Li battery compounds".^[12] In 2015 he was made a Fellow of the Materials Research Society "For the conception and development of the Materials Genome Project, highlighting the benefits and applications of first-principles modeling, and accelerating rational design and iteration of materials for energy".^[13] He was awarded the Materials Research Society (MRS) 2016 Theory Award^[14][15] and the 2017 International Battery Award in Research.^[16] Gerbrand Ceder was elected to the National Academy of Engineering 2017, "For the development of practical computational materials design and its application to the improvement of energy storage technology".^[4]

He has also received the Battery Research Award from the Electrochemical Society, a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, and the Robert Lansing Hardy Award from The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society for "exceptional promise for a successful career".

As a faculty member at MIT he taught 3.320 Atomistic Computer Modeling of Materials, which is available freely online via MIT OpenCourseWare and YouTube. He has won multiple graduate school teaching awards from MIT.