Rate My Professor Ann Huang

Chun Ann Huang is an Associate Professor in Energy Storage Materials and Reader in the Department of Materials, Faculty of Engineering, at Imperial College London, where she also serves as Deputy Course Director for the MSc in Advanced Materials Science and Engineering. She earned her undergraduate degree in Materials Science and Engineering with First Class Honours from Imperial College London. Her interest in electrochemistry was sparked during her final-year project on cathode materials for solid oxide fuel cells. Huang then pursued a DPhil in Materials Science at the University of Oxford, supervised by Professor Patrick Grant, focusing on processing and properties of structured solid-state energy storage devices. Following her doctorate, she conducted postdoctoral research in the same group at Oxford, contributing to energy storage initiatives for low-carbon grids led by Professor Nigel Brandon at Imperial. She held an EPSRC UKRI Innovation Fellowship affiliated with SOLBAT and Nextrode projects. In 2020, Huang joined King’s College London as a Lecturer and received a Faraday Institution Industry Fellowship partnering with Hitachi High-Tech Europe. She returned to Imperial in 2022 as Senior Lecturer and has since been promoted to Associate Professor.

Huang's research centres on advanced manufacturing technologies and correlative imaging characterisation for electrochemical energy storage devices, encompassing lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries, solid-state batteries, and supercapacitors. She utilises techniques including advanced electron microscopy, spectroscopy, X-ray inelastic scattering, and computed tomography to map lithium-ion diffusion, metal deposition, and degradation mechanisms in real time. Key innovations include low-tortuosity cathodes via ice templating and X-ray Compton scattering tomography (XCS-CT). Representative publications include 'Low-tortuosity and graded lithium ion battery cathodes by ice templating' (Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 2019), 'Coral-like directional porosity lithium ion battery cathodes by ice templating' (Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 2018), and 'Design of scalable, next-generation thick electrodes: opportunities and challenges' (ACS Nano, 2021). Her contributions have earned the European Research Council Starting Grant (2022), EPSRC Open Fellowship for sustainable multivalent batteries, JPhys Energy Early Career Award (2025), Royal Society of Chemistry Faraday Early Career Prize: Marlow Prize (2025), and TechWomen100 Award (2023). Huang serves as co-investigator on the Faraday Institution Degradation project, advancing net-zero energy solutions.