Gallant, Betar

Betar Gallant is an Associate Professor and the American Bureau of Shipping Career Development Professor in Mechanical Engineering at MIT.  Dr. Gallant completed her SB (‘08), SM (‘10) and PhD (‘13) degrees in the same department.  After graduating, Dr. Gallant was a Kavli Nanoscience Institute Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. As a faculty member at MIT, Dr. Gallant leads the Energy and Gas Conversion Laboratory, which focuses on advanced battery chemistries and materials for high-energy rechargeable and primary batteries, including fluorinated cathode conversion reactions and lithium and calcium metal anodes and their interfaces. Her research is also developing insights into reaction mechanisms that underpin advanced greenhouse gas mitigation technologies, with a particular emphasis on integration of electrochemistry with CO2 capture and storage.  Her group has pioneered the scientific framework behind use of amine capture sorbents in electrochemical environments subject to direct reductive conversion, driving CO2 to products or storage phases, which has potential to contribute to alternatives of today’s energy-intensive thermal regeneration processes. Dr. Gallant is the recipient of multiple awards including an MIT Bose Fellow, Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, Scialog Fellow in Energy Storage and in Negative Emissions Science, NSF CAREER Award, the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching at MIT, and the Electrochemical Society Battery Division Early Career award.