
K.M. Abraham winners Xiangwen Gao (left) and Anna Freiberg (middle), alongside ECS Battery Division Vice Chair Marca Doeff (right).
ECS is pleased to announce the winners of the Society’s 2018 K.M. Abraham Travel Awards: Anna Freiberg and Xiangwen Gao.
In 2016, K.M. Abraham, a long-time ECS member and leader of the Battery Division, established an endowment for the division to give travel grants to two outstanding students from the fall meeting travel grant applicant pool. The student travel grant program recognizes promising students in the science and engineering areas of electrochemical energy storage and conversion and helps defray the costs of travel, lodging, registration, and subsistence for students to present a paper or a poster at an ECS meeting in a symposium sponsored or cosponsored by the Battery Division.
The award consists of an $800 check, a meeting registration waiver, a one-year student membership in ECS, a ticket to the Battery Division Luncheon at which the recipients will be recognized, and a grant award certificate. (more…)





Samuel Castro Pardo, a PhD student at Rice University in Texas, says because of his travel grant, he was able to attend AiMES last week and discover a solution he was looking for. “I’ve been struggling with a project for a few months, and a speaker mentioned something during a talk, and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I think I know why my experiment isn’t working.'” Pardo is already planning for future experiments with this newfound information.
Raisa Oliveira, a PhD student from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugual, says she wouldn’t have been able to attend AiMES without her travel grant, as her supervisor doesn’t have the finances to support the trip. “It’s an amazing opportunity to be here,” said Oliveira. “I can be drinking coffee, look up, and say, ‘this is the person whose paper I read yesterday.’ I’m meeting my stars, my scientific stars.”
Matthias Künzel, a PhD student from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, says his travel grant allowed him to attend AiMES, which he finds particularly important due to its international reach. “I think people learn different in different countries,” says Künzel. “In Germany, we follow rules strictly. Talking to other people who have different views pushes you to approach things differently.”



