Kyle Frohna

Bio: Kyle Frohna grew up in Ireland and studied nanoscience at Trinity College, Dublin. During this time, he developed a keen interest in developing technologies to combat climate change, in particular an emerging class of materials known as perovskites which have shown remarkable promise for low-cost solar cells. He pursued undergraduate research with Prof. Marco Bernardi at Caltech to atomically model perovskite properties and with Prof. Mike McGehee at Stanford to fabricate high efficiency solar cells. Kyle then earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge with Prof. Sam Stranks studying perovskite solar cells with advanced microscopy, understanding their microscopic properties to improve their macroscopic performance. For this work, Kyle was awarded a doctoral prize fellowship by the United Kingdom's Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council.

Postdoctoral research project: Nanoscale imaging of operating electrochemical devices for grid-scale energy storage.  Renewable energy systems require energy storage. Electrochemical systems (like batteries and hydrogen generation) are promising for this application but are messy on the nanoscale by design. Therefore, these systems must be understood on these length scales to achieve ultimate performance and long-term stability. As a postdoctoral fellow, Kyle will be combining his expertise of solar cells and microscopy with electrochemistry. His goal is to understand and overcome performance losses and degradation mechanisms in next-generation energy storage and fuel generation devices.

Research focus:  Energy Conversion & Storage - Batteries and Large-Scale Storage

Advisors:  Will Chueh - Materials Science & Engineering  |  Dan Congreve - Electrical Engineering

Education

Ph.D., Physics, University of Cambridge (2023)B.A. (Sc), Nanoscience, Trinity College Dublin (2017)