OUR RESEARCH
Materials for Energy Innovation and Accessibility
The Abate Lab at MIT applies electrochemistry, condensed matter physics, earth sciences, and data science to design and understand materials and systems that operate across scales, from the atomic to the geological. Our research spans developing next-generation batteries, using the Earth’s subsurface as a natural reactor to produce chemicals, and enabling efficient extraction of materials from rocks. Our central focus is on chemical redox reactions, exploring the charge and ion transport, thermodynamics, kinetics, and redox mechanisms that govern behavior at solid, liquid, and gas interfaces.
By integrating advanced characterization, theory, and autonomous experimentation, we seek to uncover fundamental insights and translate them into reliable, scalable, and affordable solutions for next-generation energy storage, computing, and mining technologies. Our research ultimately advances energy, materials, and food security, addressing some of the most pressing scientific and societal challenges of our time.
Our Research Approach
With applications mentioned above in mind, we seek and explore ideas to create new materials or engineer existing ones by manipulating their electron, spin, lattice, and orbital degree of freedom. We test these ideas using ground state and excited state calculations. We will use the results to design materials (both model systems and functional materials) and test with experiments (both at the material and device level). We will apply state-of-the-art synthesis techniques (e.g. solid-state synthesis and chemical vapor deposition), electron, optical and X-ray characterization techniques (e.g. high resolution TEM and X-ray methods both at MIT and Synchrotron sources) and quantum mechanical calculations (e.g. DFT, OCEAN and physics based high-throughput material screening). While the figure above depicts the overall scientific research approach in our group, discoveries at times are serendipitous and we aim to keep our eye for surprises and investigating them in holistic manner.
Principal Investigator
Professor Iwnetim Abate
Abate is the Chipman Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. He earned his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University and was both a Miller Fellow and a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to his Ph.D., he conducted research at IBM Almaden Research Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Abate’s work has been recognized through numerous honors, including MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 (TR35), Chemical & Engineering News’ “Talented 12”, the MIT Bose Fellowship, and the Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Solid State Ionics. He leads projects at the intersection of electrochemistry, condensed matter physics, earth sciences, and data science, with a focus on developing materials and devices for next-generation energy storage, computing, and geological chemical production. He is the principal investigator of an ARPA-E funded project on geological hydrogen and the co-founder of Addis Energy, a company commercializing his team’s invention of geological ammonia, a low-emission process for ammonia synthesis that rivals the cost and scalability of existing industrial methods.
Outside the lab, Abate is a co-founder and president of a non-profit organization (www.scifro.org) that empowers African youth to address local challenges through scientific research and innovation. The organization is generously supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Physical Society.
Group Members
Research
Facilities
Our lab is in 5th floor of building 13th housing state-of-the-art tools (including tools for electrochemical characterization, synthesis, gloveboxes, physical property measurements system, microscopes, etc. Pictures will be posted here soon). In addition. we will use shared facilities at MIT, national computing centers and synchrotron sources in the US and around the world.
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MIT
MIT.nano is a 200,000-square-foot nanoscience and nanotechnology facility in the heart of the campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Computing
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), is a high performance computing (supercomputer) user facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the United States Department of Energy
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X-ray sources
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S.
Outreach
Professor Abate is a co-founder and president of a non-profit organization (www.scifro.org) working on empowering the African youth to solve local problems through scientific research and innovation. The organization is generously supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, National Science Foundation, American Physical Society and others.
The Abate lab, through SciFro organizes and provides opportunities for the lab members and the broader MIT community to engage in educational outreach in Africa and underrepresented minority communities in the United States. This will include summer schools, boot camps, hosting research in the lab, online lectures, developing teaching kits, and recruiting for graduate studies.