Liz Freund, a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, recently won the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research award.
The award is granted to individuals who have “potential to make important contributions to the mission of the DOE Office of Science.”
As part of her award, Freund will conduct research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for six months. Her project is titled “In situ electrochemical S/TEM studies of Copper Electronucleation from Halide, Sulfate, and Perchlorate Electrolytes.”
Freund is entering her third year as a PhD student at CWRU and works in the lab of Jesse Wainright, associate professor of chemical engineering, and Robert Savinell, the George S. Dively Professor.
Her focus has been on the copper plating reaction from the Cu(I)-halide complex and she has discovered that this reaction occurs without hydrogen evolution as a side reaction, and that the deposit morphology is highly dependent on the underlying substrate.
Freund has presented her work at the 2015 Electrochemical Society Meeting in Phoenix, and she is a co-inventor on a patent application. She also was a first place winner in the 2016 Research ShowCASE competition, and was a ThinkEnergy Fellow with the Great Lakes Energy Institute at CWRU this past academic year.