A summer of materials research at Stanford.
In summer 2026 I joined Prof. Yi Cui's group at Stanford, working on lithium fluoride nanoparticles and on a different way of making cement.
What I did
From June to August 2026 I worked in Prof. Yi Cui’s group at Stanford, supervised by Qi Zheng, a postdoctoral researcher in the group. The work had two strands, and I was part of both.
The first was making lithium fluoride (LiF) nanoparticles. I worked on the synthesis alongside Qi Zheng, and that work is now going into a paper that Qi leads. I made three of the paper’s four figures.
The second was about cement. Cement clinker is usually made by heating raw materials in a rotary kiln. The group is testing another way: heating the raw materials by induction to about 2,000 °C. My part was helping to characterise the clinker that comes out of it.
To see inside the material, the samples were scanned with micro-CT at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A micro-CT scan is a stack of X-ray images that together build a 3D picture of the inside of a sample. I wrote the pipeline in Python that analyses those scans, after a friend taught me the tools, and analysed most of the micro-CT data myself.
Outcome
The results belong to the group’s papers, which are still being written, so I’ve kept them off this page until the lab is happy for them to be shared.
Both strands are turning into papers. I’m the second author on the nanoparticle paper, which is being prepared for submission, and one of the authors on a paper from the cement work, which is in preparation.
Publications
A paper on lithium fluoride nanoparticle synthesis. Lead author Qi Zheng; I’m the second author. Being prepared for submission to the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). A paper on the cement clinker work, on which I’m one of the authors. In preparation.