Nina Balke

Nina Balke is a research staff member in the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN. She earned her PhD in Materials Sciences at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany working with ferroelectric ceramics. In 2007, she received a Feodor-Lynen fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation to perform postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley in the group of R. Ramesh, and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory under the leadership of S. V. Kalinin where she focused on scanning probe microscopy (SPM) characterization of electromechanical effects in oxides. Since 2010, she has been a research staff member at CNMS where she focused on oxides for electrical energy storage.

Dr. Balke has published more than 40 papers in peer-reviewed journals, half of them in high impact journals. She was involved in the development of new characterization techniques for energy storage electrode materials, which was awarded the Microscopy Today Innovation Award in 2011. In the same year, she received the Department of Energy Early Career Research Award for her work on Li-ion battery materials. Besides electrode materials for Li-ion batteries, her current research focuses on carbon-based materials for electrochemical supercapacitor applications and the development of SPM-based techniques in liquid environment for in-situ studies of energy storage systems. She has been an ACerS member since 2009 in the Basic Science Division and she received the Roland B. Snow award in 2010 for the ceramograph “Tracking Li-ion motion on the nanoscale.”