Winner: 2025 Centenary Prize for Chemistry and Communication
Professor Sarbajit Banerjee
ETH Zürich and the Paul Scherrer Institute
Download celebratory graphic
2025 Centenary Prize for Chemistry and Communication: awarded for original insights into structure and chemical bonding far from equilibrium, and for excellence in communicating chemical principles underpinning clean energy to the public.
Professor Banerjee has sought to develop a new atlas for exploring far-from-equilibrium structure and bonding in periodic inorganic solids. His research illustrates that composition does not limit structure, and therefore properties, but rather that structure can often be controlled independently from composition.
He has developed a set of predictive design rules for identifying viable metastable compounds, established a large toolbox of chemical methods for synthesising new structures, expanded fundamental understanding of bonding away from thermodynamic minima, and explored how unusual structural motifs manifested in metastable compounds can be harnessed to realise new function.
His ability to chart energy landscapes has not only improved fundamental understanding of chemical bonding far from equilibrium but also has practical implications in numerous advanced technologies such as in the design of lithium- and 鈥渂eyond lithium鈥� battery components, isotope separation for nuclear energy, brain-inspired computing to enable artificial intelligence, and solar fuel production.
Biography
Sarbajit Banerjee is a Full Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Z眉rich and serves as head of the laboratory for battery science at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). He is a graduate of St Stephen鈥檚 College (BSc) and the State University of New York at Stony Brook (PhD).
After working as a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, he began his independent career at the University at Buffalo in 2007. At SUNY Buffalo, he was promoted to associate professor in 2012. In 2014, Professor Banerjee moved to Texas A&M University as a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering, where he was named the Davidson Chair in 2020.
His research accomplishments have been recognised by numerous awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the American Chemical Society ExxonMobil Solid-State-Chemistry Faculty Fellowship, the Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the Journal of Physical Chemistry Lectureship. In 2012, MIT Technology Review named Professor Banerjee on its global list of Innovators Under 35. He was named by NASA as an Innovative Advanced Concepts Fellow in 2021, and in 2020 and 2021, he received two separate Special Creativity Extension Awards from the National Science Foundation.
His research interests are focused on mechanisms and materials design for electrochemical energy storage, electron-correlated solids, electronic structure studies at interfaces, metastable materials, energy-efficient computation, multifunctional coatings, and the development of synchrotron spectroscopy and imaging methods.
Chemistry is a lens through which we understand our natural world, a vital engine of our modern economies, and potentially an enabling tool to lift vast populations out of poverty if we can democratise access to discoveries.
Professor Sarbajit Banerjee
Q&A with Professor Sarbajit Banerjee
How did you first become interested in chemistry?
It was specifically in eleventh grade that I really developed an interest in chemistry. I still remember a conversation with my high school chemistry teacher who asked if I had ever thought about chemistry as a career, because he saw me as having some sort of knack for the subject. I think he was being rather generous, and I didn鈥檛 really believe I had any sort of special talent, but it got me thinking that I did enjoy the subject, and it would probably be a better career choice than some of the other subjects I liked.
I chose to read chemistry at St Stephen鈥檚 College for my undergraduate degree and had the incredible privilege of being taught by some passionate and truly gifted faculty who poured everything into conveying the joys of discovery. Some of my happiest memories are from immersing myself in chemistry as an undergraduate.
There weren鈥檛 many opportunities for research, but my chemistry professors always had time for me and would entertain all my questions with good humour and encouragement. I read widely as an undergraduate 鈥� going to the library and combing through freshly arrived journals of which I understood little. Yet the few research talks I was able to attend gave me goosebumps from watching the speakers describe with clear passion the results they had obtained in their laboratories. I was also surrounded by peers who were equally passionate about chemistry 鈥� many have remained close friends.
What motivates you?
We live in precarious times, with depleting natural resources and formidable challenges at the food-water-energy nexus. I see fundamental science as playing a critical role in addressing the defining challenges of our generation. At this 鈥榓ll hands on deck鈥� moment, I am most strongly motivated to develop complete solutions for a sustainable future, which will require bridging between fundamental science and technological innovation.
I am most passionate about advancing the foundations of energy storage, and to devise scalable solutions that accelerate the energy transition and benefit all of humanity. While we have many challenges to overcome, we stand at a moment rich with promise. We have at our disposal unprecedented science and technology tools to shape the energy transition, bring along our communities, educate change makers and to build a more sustainable future. This is what I hope to accomplish as I start a new chapter at ETH Z眉rich and the Paul Scherrer Institute.
What advice would you give to a young person considering a career in chemistry?
I believe it is important to pursue one鈥檚 passion in science, regardless of whether it is the current fad. Perhaps the most important lesson I鈥檝e learned in my career, and so the advice I pass on to my students, is to be unafraid of the new and to boldly step out and take big risks in terms of pursuing novel ideas and directions. I also see chemistry as truly being the 鈥榗entral science鈥� and I think it鈥檚 important to learn from physics, math, engineering, biology and medicine, and to see how the exciting new directions in these fields could perhaps advance the chemical sciences.
Can you tell us about a scientific development on the horizon that you are excited about?
As a solid-state chemist, electrochemist and materials scientist, I am greatly excited about emerging tool sets that are becoming available to peer deep into the secret lives of atoms and to watch the dynamical evolution of matter with time and space resolution better than has been available at any time in human history. Advances in synchrotron science, neutron methods, free-electron lasers and muon sources have the promise to entirely reimagine scientific discovery.
These incredible new experimental tools provide inspiration and opportunity to design new materials and molecules to fulfil desired functions. I am hugely fortunate to be located near an amazing constellation of such tools at the Paul Scherrer Institut. I am excited for transformative advances that will allow us to further push up to and beyond current limits of energy, temporal and spatial resolution, and to start to harness the power of AI to accelerate the discovery of materials and molecules.
What has been a highlight for you (either personally or in your career)?
I have always taught first year/freshman chemistry, because I鈥檝e wanted to share my love and passion for chemistry with students early on in their college careers. I was deeply touched to be named a 鈥楩ish Camp鈥� namesake 鈥� which is an honour at Texas A&M, where students name a freshman orientation camp after someone they admire. It鈥檚 always a highlight to hear back from students as they find their own paths in science and beyond.
What does good research culture look like/mean to you?
As an academic chemist, I see mechanisms, ideas and foundational concepts as being of utmost importance and caution against the push towards device metrics. With so much left to discover, I am also not a fan of the 鈥榟erding鈥� behaviour one sees now where intense research attention is focused narrowly on just a few topics. Our needs as a society are many and complex and I am especially interested in seeing original research ideas come to fruition rather than incremental ideas gather citations.
How are the chemical sciences making the world a better place?
Chemistry is a lens through which we understand our natural world, a vital engine of our modern economies, and potentially an enabling tool to lift vast populations out of poverty if we can democratise access to discoveries.
Why do you think collaboration and teamwork are important in science?
Collaboration and teamwork are essential to taking a swing at some of the defining problems of our generation. Our needs as a society are many in a planet that faces an increasingly precarious future, and where the benefits of scientific discovery have not reached many communities.
No one person has all the answers. It is essential to work in teams to have impact on the real world and translate ideas from sketches and notes on old chalkboards and crumpled paper to practical and workable technologies that will sustain human habitation of this planet in a sustainable manner and raise the standards of living of communities around the world. I have had the immense privilege in my scientific career to have worked with some incredible people 鈥� who are great scientists and amazing humans. We have graduated 35 PhDs so far and trained about a dozen postdoctoral researchers and over 100 undergraduates.
It鈥檚 been a huge honour and privilege to have been part of their journeys in science and to see them grow as researchers and professionals. Similarly, I鈥檝e had the opportunity to work closely with many colleagues who bring distinctive expertise, without which it would not have been possible to advance our science.
A complete list would be impossible, but we鈥檝e learned so much from collaborations: Daniel Fischer, Cherno Jaye and Conan Weiland at NIST; Bai-Xiang Xu at TU Darmstadt; Dave Watson, Sambandamurthy Ganapathy and Peihong Zhang at Buffalo; Mohammed Al-Hashimi at HBKU; David Prendergast and Jinghua Guo at LBNL; Louis Piper at Warwick; Beth Guiton at Kentucky; Partha Mukherjee at Purdue; Matt Pharr, Lei Fang, Patrick Shamberger, Xiaofeng Qian, and R. Stanley Williams at Texas A&M.
Many of these collaborations stretch back decades, others are just emerging. One of the greatest joys has been working with industry 鈥� spanning the range from small start-ups to large energy companies 鈥� and to see our fundamental science discoveries translated to practical value.
What is your favourite element?
For the entirety of my independent career, I have been fascinated by the 23rd element 鈥� vanadium. Many inorganic chemists discuss how each element has a certain character and a 鈥榩ersonality鈥�. Vanadium is a mischievous (sometimes elusive) old friend we get to know in new ways every day. We have been fortunate to unlock some of the mysteries of vanadium compounds 鈥� their phase transformations; coupling of spin, charge and orbital degrees of freedom; redox cascades; and a cornucopia of bonding motifs. It鈥檚 been an incredibly rich playground, and we鈥檝e only just scratched the surface. I am excited about how this element can play a potentially transformative role in many emerging technologies that will be vital to the energy transition.