This week, Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang will receive the American Ceramic Society with the ACerS 2009 Corporate Technical Achievement Award in recognition of his outstanding achievement in field of ceramics, particularly in founding A123 Systems.  A cover story in the ACerS Bulletin describes how Prof. Chiang became a materials scientist and the history of A123. DMSE Alumni/ae and friends will recognize many names of instructors, colleagues, and friends.

Auto manufacturer Chrysler said this week it has chosen A123Systems, a Watertown company based on technology developed at MIT, to make batteries for its new Envi line of electric and hybrid cars.

A123Systems was co-founded in 2001 by Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Several of the company’s key early employees also came from MIT.

For more, see the MIT News Office.

A team of MIT researchers including Profs. Angela Belcher, Gerd Ceder, and Michael Strano of Chemical Engineering have shown they can genetically engineer viruses to build both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion battery. Angela Belcher holds a display of the virus-built battery she helped engineer. The battery — the silver-colored disc — is being used to power an LED. The new virus-produced batteries have the same energy capacity and power performance as state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries being considered to power plug-in hybrid cars, and they could also be used to power a range of personal electronic devices, said Angela Belcher, the MIT materials scientist who led the research team. The new batteries, described in the April 2 online edition of Science, could be manufactured with a cheap and environmentally benign process: The synthesis takes place at and below room temperature and requires no harmful organic solvents, and the materials that go into the battery are non-toxic. For more details, see the MIT News Office. The story has also been covered by

Green Tech Media

National Geographic

The Korea Times

The BBC

Prof. Gerd Ceder will discuss the “battery beltway” research on NPR’s Talk of the Nation “Science Friday” on March 13. His segment will begin about 2:20, Eastern time.

Update: Link to the segment.

MIT engineers have created a kind of beltway that allows for the rapid transit of electrical energy through a well-known battery material, an advance that could usher in smaller, lighter batteries — for cell phones and other devices — that could recharge in seconds rather than hours.

The work could also allow for the quick recharging of batteries in electric cars, although that particular application would be limited by the amount of power available to a homeowner through the electric grid.

The work, led by Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, is reported in the March 12 issue of Nature.

See the MIT News Office for the full story. Learn more about the Ceder Group’s research.

Update: The story has been covered in

the Boston Globe

Technology Review

the Times, UK

Scientific American

IEEE Spectrum

the BBC

Forbes

Discover Magazine