Martin Z. Bazant is the E. G. Roos (1944) Professor of Chemical Engineering and Mathematics and Executive Officer of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Bazant is a leader in electrochemical systems, electrokinetics, and applied mathematics. In the area of electrokinetic flows, he predicted nonlinear electro-osmotic flows around microelectrodes and dielectric surfaces, as well as the related induced-charge electrophoretic motion of asymmetric polarizable particles. One of his related patents is a new method of water desalination — “shock electrodialysis” — which was first demonstrated in his lab.
In another area, Martin unified chemical kinetics with nonequilibrium thermodynamics to generate new understanding of transport in Li-based batteries — including such effects as configurational entropy, short-range forces, surface energy, and elastic coherency strain. His approach led to the first prediction of surface nucleation and intercalation waves in nanoparticles, suppression of phase separation by electro-autocatalysis, and “mosaic instabilities” of phase transformations in porous electrodes.
Martin is director of the Toyota Research Institute’s Center for Data-Driven Design of Rechargeable Batteries, and the Chief Scientific Advisor for Saint Gobain Ceramics and Plastics, North America. His educational innovations include new classes on Electrochemical Energy Systems and Random Walks and Diffusion, as well as a graduate-level massive open online chemical engineering course on Analysis of Transport Phenomena.