Marca Doeff
Marca Doeff is a senior scientist and deputy division director of the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She received her B.A. in Chemistry from Swarthmore College, Swarthmore PA in 1978 and a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from Brown University, Providence RI in 1983. After postdoctoral work at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Berkeley, she joined the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego, CA in 1986 to do research on antifouling coatings. She joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1990, where she began research related to electric vehicle batteries. Her current research, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and California Energy Commission, focuses on materials for lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries, and solid-state batteries and she has published over 160 peer-reviewed papers and patented extensively in these areas. Her google scholar h-index is 70. She is currently Secretary of the Electrochemical Society and is a fellow of that Society as well as of the Royal Society of Chemistry. She is the recipient of a R&D100 award in 2020, a Distinguished Achievement award from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Vehicle Technologies in 2023 and the Electrochemical Society San Francisco Section award in 2024.
Curriculum Vitae
doeff_shortcv.pdfAwards
2020 R&D 100 Award: Solid Lithium Battery - October 5th 2020
Solid Lithium Battery (SLiB) Using Hard and Soft Solid Electrolytes
The lithium battery market is expected to grow from more than $37 billion in 2019 to more than $94 billion by 2025. However, the liquid electrolytes used in most commercial lithium-ion batteries are flammable and limit the ability to achieve higher energy densities. Safety issues continue to plague the electronics markets, as often-reported lithium battery fires and explosions result in casualties and financial losses.
In Berkeley Lab’s solid lithium battery, the organic electrolytic solution is replaced by two solid electrolytes, one soft and one hard, and lithium metal is used in place of the graphite anode. In addition to eliminating battery fires, incorporation of a lithium metal anode with a capacity 10 times higher than graphite (the conventional anode material in lithium-ion batteries) provides much higher energy densities.
The technology was developed by Berkeley Lab scientists Marca Doeff, Guoying Chen, and Eongyu Yi, along with collaborators at Montana State University.