Under the direction of Dr. Cary Pint, Kate (Moyer) Vanderburgh worked on sustainably engineering electrode materials and additives for energy storage systems.
She graduated from the Vanderbilt University Interdisciplinary Materials Science Ph.D. program in December of 2019. She was an NSF GRFP recipient and summer 2018 intern at NASA Kennedy Space Center to investigate structural lithium-ion battery composites. Kate routinely used the characterization tools and equipment enabled by VINSE to perform her research and particularly enjoyed using electron microscopy to address her research questions. While at Vanderbilt, Kate loved the outreach and professional development opportunities and participated in and led the VINSE Blackberry Solar Cell Labs, collaborated with VINSE REU students, and mentored high school and Vanderbilt undergraduate students. After graduating from Vanderbilt, Kate worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as a postdoc under the guidance of Dr. Francesco Fornasiero studying carbon nanotube growth for next-generation membrane technology. During her two years at LLNL, Kate earned a Lab Directed Research and Development grant and led an interdisciplinary team of researchers to study cycling limitations in lithium-ion batteries. Today, Kate is a Research Instrumentation Specialist at Drexel University where she is the scanning electron microscope manager.