Yildiz works toward materials to power the green revolution

Bilge Yildiz cannot pick favorites among her many research projects involving the electrochemistry of inorganic materials, work that ranges from the electro-synthesis of carbon-free fuels to energy-efficient computer chips that emulate the human brain. 

“That would be like asking me to choose among my kids,” says the Breen M. Kerr Professor in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) at MIT. Besides, she continues, “whatever is the newest open research question we’re focusing on, is the one I am most excited about at a given time.”

Yildiz’ research falls into three broad categories. One involves understanding the fundamentals of how materials in electrochemical systems like fuel cells and electrolyzers work or fail, and using that knowledge to make them better. Another focuses on solid-state batteries, or those that “don’t rely on organic liquid electrolytes, like in our current lithium ion batteries, but work with inorganic, solid electrolytes,” Yildiz says. Among their advantages: solid-state batteries are safer because they’re not flammable, and they can achieve higher energy densities (they are good at storing large amounts of charge).  

A third area of interest involves battery-like, “neuromorphic” devices her team is developing for brain-inspired computing. Here she and her team are working with MIT neuroscientists “to learn from them how we learn certain things in the biological brain.” The goal, she says, is to “emulate their learning rule—what they have deduced from experimental and theoretical neuroscience studies—with our devices.”

The devices Yildiz and colleagues are developing promise to be much more energy-efficient than today’s computer chips. “This is important given the exponentially fast increase in energy use of AI worldwide,” Yildiz says. She emphasizes that the future energy demand of AI is not sustainable without new technologies.

Driving her work on neuromorphic computing devices is the transport of protons—the positively charged nucleus of a hydrogen atom—rather than electrons. Only last month the Yildiz team reported the features of a material “that make the proton easier to transport; that make a material a better proton conductor,” Yildiz says. They did so by developing “a physical model to predict proton mobility across a wide range of metal oxides,” according to a story in MIT News. 

Yildiz described some of this work at Materials Day 2025, Designing the Future of Extreme Materials. In an abstract for that event, which was organized by the Materials Research Laboratory, Yildiz wrote how her lab’s overall approach “lays ground for the physically informed search of fast proton conductors and enlarges the chemical space of materials to power the green revolution.”