Northeastern professor Hongli (Julie) Zhu wants to power modern society with longer lasting, safer batteries.
Powering up the future
When Hongli “Julie” Zhu hears about an electric car or scooter somewhere catching fire, she knows it’s likely a failed battery. And that’s the spark she needs to work harder, because she believes her world of science can fix it.
“There’s a better way,” she said.
Zhu, an associate professor at Northeastern University’s College of Engineering, wants to make a stronger and – most importantly – safer battery using a new design and materials that won’t let its innards overheat.
“Batteries are important to everything we do,” Zhu said. “It’s portable energy.…Modern society means you have to plug into power.”
But many lithium-ion batteries have an electrolyte liquid core that can sometimes cause fire. Zhu wants to replace these batteries with a next generation of power storage made with a solid ceramic core that she says doesn’t catch fire.
The typical lithium-ion battery in your computer or electric car works by pushing around ion atoms, which carry current making, subatomic electrons, between two electrodes, all driven by a chemical reaction.
One electrode is the cathode, which typically is made of a lithium-cobalt metal, and the other is an anode, largely made of graphite, Zhu said. Both electrodes bathe in a chemical electrolyte chemical soup inside the battery casing.
But they sometimes cause fires. There were at least 25,000 incidents of fire or overheating in lithium-ion batteries between 2020 and 2025, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The overheating and fires happen when a chain reaction happens inside the battery – typically sparked by a flaw that allows part of the anode to touch the cathode. That creates a short circuit that superheats the fluid and causes a fire, according to the National Fire Protection Association’s website.
The chain reaction is called thermal runaway and it is difficult to stop because the burning batteries make their own oxygen, according to the fire protection group.
It’s that chance of fire, Zhu explained, that causes airlines to prohibit passengers from putting most devices with such batteries in checked luggage that is headed to the plane’s storage hold.
The new solid-state battery that Zhu has created uses a solid electrolyte made from a specially formulated ceramic with sulfide-ions to let the ion atoms move around on a crystalline structure between the anode and cathode.
The batteries look like gray cylinder blocks – something akin to a biscuit from a Pillsbury tube at the supermarket, if it was as hard and gray as concrete.
“These are the future,” Zu said. And they’re different.
The atomic structure of her ceramic batteries uses sulfur-ions which move electrons in a different way.
Imagine the lithium-ions and sulfur-ions are all balls, she explained. Both types of balls can carry electrons to make electricity, if free to do so. But Zhu said the lithium ion “is like a ball floating in water.”
In her prototype solid state battery, the sulfur-ion is fast, like a “basket ball, bouncing along the crystalline structure,” she said. And because it’s solid, there’s little chance of a fire starting due to short-circuiting.
Zhu undertakes her work in a small lab on Northeastern’s Boston campus, crowded with workbenches and tables, and milling machinery.
Atop some benches are several clear, box-like acrylic cabinets where the hands and arms go into them sheathed in heavy rubber gloves and sleeves. Inside the cabinets is a clutter of round, gray cylinder batteries, lots of wires, small tools and voltage reading dials.
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There, they grind and mix the electrolyte material and heat-treat them into discs. Each disc is layered like a tall sandwich compressed until it becomes a solid, short, fat cylinder with electrodes in them.
Lots of companies and scientists have been working on producing batteries similar to Zhu’s. But the limitations so far have been designs and production costs, according to Construction Physics, an online magazine dedicated to industrial technology.
Zhu’s quest to find a better battery spans more than 10 years, when she opened her lab and was able to attract students from across the U.S. and around the world to Northeastern to learn from her, said Yingzi Lin, a distinguished professor and the chair of the mechanical and industrial engineering department.
Today, “she has a global reputation,” Lin said.
Zhu’s work has been cited more than 26,000 times on Google Scholar Citations, an online service that lets researchers track who is citing their academic publications.
Her expertise in energy storage was also recognized by ACS Energy Letters, a publication for engineers, which featured her this year in its “Women Scientists at the Forefront of Energy Research” series.
And in September, Zhu was selected to receive the 2027 Research Excellence Award in Electrochemical Energy Storage from the American Chemical Society’s Energy and Fuel Division. The D.C.-based nonprofit group, dedicated to promoting science, has more than 260,000 members and affiliates globally.
“It’s really a big deal,” Lin said. “The ACS is a big society, it’s hard to get recognized, so this honors her reputation in the field. It’s hard to imagine how hard she had to work for this.”
Of the award, Zhu said, “I’m very happy about it. I love my job, I really love research.”
