MechE Seminar Series: Joerg G. Werner

Speaker: Joerg G. Werner

Title: Multiscale Mesostructured Materials and Devices for Energy and Sustainability Applications

Abstract: Many methods for the synthesis of nanoscaled objects have been discovered over the past decades, but the scalable fabrication of precise 3-D nano-architected materials and composites remains challenging. In this talk, I will first provide an overview of our research on various soft matter phenomena as tunable fabrication platforms for creating extended mesoscale structures of functional polymer and inorganic materials, ranging from multiscale liquid/polymer phase separation for low-tortuosity electrodes with dual-scale porosity to nanostructured gels from block copolymer self-assembly with ordered periodic morphologies. I will then focus my discussion on our discovery of a novel thin-film deposition paradigm, the Electrodeposition of Polymer Networks (EPoN), which enables conformal coatings of tunable submicron thickness on conductive materials of arbitrary topographies, including porous electrodes. Our EPoN method is designed to yield surface-confined, self-limiting, and defect-correcting thin-film deposition that is suitable for a wide variety of polymers and conductive substrates. I will demonstrate EPoN in the context of solid polymer electrolyte interphases for batteries, polyamine coatings for carbon capture, and modular reactive thin films for autonomous materials discovery in self-driving labs.

About the Speaker: Joerg Werner received his Diplom in Chemistry in 2011 from the Johannes Gutenberg University, and his Ph.D. in 2016 at Cornell University, followed by a postdoc at Harvard University before starting at Boston University in 2020. Prof. Werner received a DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2023 with a Director’s Fellowship in 2025, was named an Emerging Investigator by the RSC Journal of Materials Chemistry A, and an Early Investigator Symposium Honoree from the PMSE division of ACS, both in 2025. Prof. Werner co-founded BU’s Energy and Sustainability Technology (BEST) Lab in 2023, a multi-PI virtual lab to build community for students and faculty and accelerate open collaboration.