BUFFALO, N.Y. -- University at Buffalo chemist Luis De Jesús Báez has received the 2025 Stanford R. Ovshinsky Fellowship from the American Physical Society for his work developing new, more sustainable materials for energy storage.
The fellowship awards seed funding of $15,000 for promising exploratory research aimed at energy sustainability, particularly efficient and low-cost energy conversion technologies that do not rely on fossil fuels and have viable potential for commercialization.
De Jesús Báez's lab is creating special templates made from vanadium chalcogenides that let researchers precisely tune atomic structures and improve ion movement, advances that could lead to better batteries, supercapacitors and other next-generation energy-storage devices.
It's all part of their effort to expand the chemical toolbox used by materials scientists to precisely tailor the activity of materials for energy storage.
"I'm honored that the American Physical Society considers my work a good direction for the next generation of electrode architectures for energy storage," says De Jesús Báez, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, within the UB College of Arts and Sciences.
The APS also bestowed De Jesús Báez with its 2024 Forum for Early Career Scientists (FECS) Diversity & Inclusion Award. He connected students from his alma mater, the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, to the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates program and graduate opportunities at Texas A&M University and other top universities across the country.
De Jesús Báez has received numerous other honors since joining UB in 2022. He was selected as a 2025 Young Observer by the U.S. National Committee for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the world authority on chemical nomenclature and terminology, including the naming of new elements in the periodic table.
He received a SUNY Technology Accelerator Fund and a Faculty-Industry Applied Research award from UB's Center of Excellence in Materials Informatics in 2024 for his work in partnership with Copprium. The UB spinout manufactures conductive copper inks and is innovating new methods of applying them to electronic circuitry.
In 2023, he became UB's first-ever recipient of a 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award, which the company awards to non-tenured faculty who have demonstrated a prolific record in research and academic leadership. He has also been named a Scialog: Negative Emission Science Fellow and a National Science Foundation Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program Lighthouse Beacon Fellow.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, De Jesús Báez received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey in 2012. He received his PhD in chemistry at Texas A&M University in 2018 and served as a Provost Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.