Season 2, Episode 7: Evolution of a Battery Chemist, Daniel Collins-Wildman
Hey, Everyone! Welcome back to Brym - it’s Season 2, Episode 7! A quick note before we dive in about this new Season and how it’s a bit different than Season 1 (if you haven’t already caught our drift)…
In Season 2 of Brym Labs, we will be highlighting stories directly from changemakers across the world - inviting them to tell their own stories in their own ways in the spirit of Citizen Journalism! In addition to a written piece in their own words, we’ll also be doing interviews so you get to hear from their own voice as well!
In this week’s Climate Story and Interview, we hear from Daniel Collins-Wildman! Daniel got his PhD in Chemistry from Emory University and now is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab working on battery technology and renewable energy! Daniel is also a member of Brym’s Global Working Group working on a few projects we’ll be able to share soon!
Keep an eye out for our Year 1 Thesis Report and keep your eyes peeled for some other exciting announcements coming soon on Brym initiatives heading into Q2!
As always, feel free to follow along on Apple Podcasts as well! Hope you enjoy…
Evolution of a Battery Chemist
Author: Daniel Collins-Wildman, February 9, 2023
People often say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. This was definitely true for my relationship with nature and the wilderness as I was growing up.
I was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and for most of the year the green spaces I experienced were the small tracts of land set aside as public parks. They were wonderful, but it wasn’t really nature, I used to think.
During the summer, my family would often travel to Vermont, and then as I got older, farther afield to see the natural wonders of the United States. We saw lovely green lakes and ponds in the northeast, and tall mountains out west. Going on vacation was a magical time where each place brought with it new experiences: new sights, sounds, smells, and many curious new plants and animals.
I was particularly fascinated by the delicate balance that seemed to exist in these places hardly touched by human influence. These summer trips were the highlights of my year. They drew me to seek out ways to explore and find natural places wherever I could closer to home, whether this was climbing in Central Park or biking up the Hudson River.
The Author’s childhood home (photo credit Google Maps).
In high school, this love of the outdoors drew me to get a job at the Forestry Service in Driggs, Idaho as part of the Youth Conservation Corps. While I was there, I got to climb on Mount Moran with my friends Nicky and Forrest, and their father Jon.
Jon led us up an old mountaineering route that he remembered from when he had done it 30 or so years earlier. When we were up on the mountain, he noted how many of the snowfields were much smaller than he remembered; he had noticed this in many other places as well throughout the surrounding mountain range, the Grand Tetons.
I had known about climate change before this point, but this personal experience hit me differently. Climate change wasn’t some looming catastrophe that would eventually catch up with us, it was happening now.
Maybe some part of me had been a skeptic. Maybe I hadn’t been ready to face the reality that collectively we were creating a changing climate that was and would continue to damage ecosystems and communities around the world until we took action to change our ways.
Regardless, I became determined that if there was something I could do to stop, or at least slow down, these changes caused by human activities, I would center my career around this mission.
From left to right: the Author, Nicky, Jon, and Forrest on Mount Moran.
In addition to my passion for the natural world, I love figuring out how things work.
Studying Chemistry (“the central science”) therefore was a perfect fit when I got to college. One of my first jobs after graduating was at a battery research lab at the City College of New York (CCNY). In the basement of the engineering building, I saw something that changed my view of batteries and gave me a whole new perspective on how to combat climate change.
In front of me was a small room full of batteries capable of powering the entire building: elevators, heating, cooling, everything. This is exciting in its own right, but when I think about the need for energy storage devices such as batteries to enable us to get 100% of our energy from renewable sources, I get even more excited.
Without batteries a solar panel is useless when the sun goes down, but if you charge a battery during the day with excess energy from the solar panel, you can have 100% clean energy all day.
In the basement of CCNY, I saw that we have the technology to make this happen, we just need to implement it at scale.
The Author working in a battery fabrication glovebox at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The Author working in a battery fabrication glovebox at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Today I work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the goal of developing technologies that will help lower the cost of batteries for grid-scale energy storage. By doing so, we hope to make renewables plus batteries more competitive and ideally one day cheaper than fossil fuel-based energy.
Lowering the cost, I believe, is only one part of the story, though. We also need communities around the world to invest in renewable energy infrastructure, which will help pave the way for others to believe that these technologies really do work.
This is why I am excited to be a part of Brym. I see this as an opportunity to go beyond the lab and engage directly with communities that are looking to build clean energy infrastructure. The challenge ahead of us is immense, but that is why it is so important for all of us to keep talking, keep communicating, and together, I believe we will see the tide begin to turn.
I’m eager to see all the creative solutions that we continue to develop to combat climate change, and I look forward to keeping this conversation going with anyone who’s interested.
Huge thank you to Daniel for sharing his awesome story! Up next, look out for our next Climate Story on February 23rd from Kavindu Ediriweera + lots of exciting things in the works for 2023!!
Have a great rest of the week everyone and a safe weekend.
