Congratulations to Dr Linlin Xu!

Many Congratulations, Dr Linlin Xu! Linlin recently defended and now officially completed her PhD thesis at UCL Chemical Engineering / CNIE on using NICE and our nature-inspired solution methodology to design PEM hydrogen fuel cells and CO2 electrolysers with much more efficient, stable water management, with a little help from the Australian thorny devil and Texan horned lizards!
These creatures' mechanism to direct water transport through capillary action served as inspiration for a water management strategy that avoids flooding even at very high relative humidity, and drastically improves overall device stability and scalability.
Linlin's PhD research, funded by a competitive Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) DTP studentship, started during testing times in 2020, when we could not meet in person for many months, with labs only gradually opening. Despite this difficult start, Linlin proved herself to be an incredibly resourceful, talented, and productive researcher. She combined computational simulations, experimental validation, and advanced imaging techniques.
She already wrote first-author articles in Advanced Energy Materials (electrocatalytic CO2 reduction to C2+) and Advanced Science, with important contributions to a review on bio-inspired design of electrocatalysts for CO2 reduction to C1 products in Angewandte Chemie with Dr Panagiotis Trogadas, who co-advised her work at the UCL Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering (CNIE).
Linlin was a great pleasure to have in the lab, and very collaborative, particularly with the UCL-Electrochemical Innovation Lab, including Dr Dan Brett early on and joint research with Dr Rhodri Jervis, including research on (operando) neutron imaging (also at Diamond Light Source) to gain insight in water management and mass transport in PEM fuel cells and with Dr Yang Lan Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering (CNIE)) on bio-inspired membranes with enhanced proton conductivity. This led to 8 journal publications during her four-year PhD period, with more to come!
She was also an excellent, perfectly organised teaching assistant, supporting my NICE course on- and offline and helpful to the students.
Many thanks to Prof Robert Steinberger-Wilckens (University of Birmingham) and Dr Alex Rettie (UCL) who thoroughly examined Linlin on 11 November, with much helpful feedback.

(Author: Prof. Marc-Olivier Coppens)