Newnham Research Fellow Alice Merryweather’s battery start-up Illumion has grown so rapidly that she is to dedicate her time fully to focusing on its development. The start-up aims to inform the development of faster charging batteries with longer usable lifetimes, and was started by Alice with Cambridge colleagues while completing her PhD.
In her PhD research, Alice used optical techniques to study materials inside batteries that store the charge. Batteries store chemical energy and convert it to electrical energy. Alice looked in detail at the materials to see this process in real time.
While presenting her successful early PhD research results, Alice was approached by an audience member who suggested she think about commercialising the process.
Illumion was founded by Alice towards the end of her PhD, with her PhD supervisors Prof Akshay Rao and Prof Dame Clare Grey, alongside postdoctoral researcher Christoph Schnedermann. While Alice heads Research and Development and Christoph is CEO, the supervisors are academic advisors. The start-up is developing and commercialising optical scattering microscopy techniques to probe ion transport dynamics and degradation in operating battery materials.
As Head of Research and Development at Illumion, Alice developed a tool to study materials at the particle level and gain insights into the limitations of battery materials, to inform their improvement. The technique is called ‘charge photometry’, which visualises charge storage processes and degradation within batteries.
The company aims to help accelerate battery material development for uses including clean energy. The goal is to understand the charging process and battery material degradation in greater depth, to improve battery technology and inform the development of new ways of storing clean energy. Illumion has sold the tool to research groups in the US, Germany and China, with Alice travelling to the country to install the equipment and train users.
“The big picture is cleaner energy and providing a tool to helps to make that work even better,” she said.
As an undergraduate Alice studied chemistry and physics at the University of Durham, graduating in 2018. She then moved to Cambridge to study for her PhD.
Illumion was founded in December 2022, and at the start of 2023 they hired their first employees. Meanwhile, Alice joined Newnham in October 2023 as a Research Fellow and found her academic research intertwined with her work with the company and vice versa. Since then, Illumion has continued to grow. It has doubled in size since Christmas and now has 10 employees, as well as the two co-founding academic supervisors.
“I have been doing both and now the company is taking most of my time. I didn’t expect this but it is exciting and a great opportunity to further pursue my research and apply it,”Alice Merryweather, Head of Research and Development at Illumion
She hopes to keep a connection to her friends and colleagues at Newnham after leaving her Junior Research Fellowship this month.