About

Jacob Florian

PhD candidate in Chemical Engineering at Stanford University.

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Background

I’m a PhD candidate in Chemical Engineering at Stanford University, working in the Zhenan Bao Group.

My work focuses on electrochemical interfaces, from batteries to catalysts, and how they evolve during operation. I bring together electrochemical measurements, materials characterization, and molecular modeling.

Before Stanford, I studied physics at the University of Cambridge as a Churchill Scholar and chemical engineering at the University of Michigan.

Lithium batteriesElectrochemical interfacesMolecular modeling

Recent publication 2026 Simply Fabricatable Reference Electrode for Studying Li Metal Interfaces Operando ACS Energy Letters

Research

Battery interfaces, electrochemical characterization, and molecular modeling.

Stanford University · 2023–present

Lithium metal interfaces

I design electrolytes and interfaces for lithium metal and lithium-ion batteries. I develop reference electrodes and operando electrochemical methods to isolate what happens at battery interfaces under realistic operating conditions.

Reference electrode ↗Interphase transport ↗

University of Cambridge · 2021–2022

Molecular design for CO₂ conversion

I used density functional theory and electronic structure descriptors to guide the design of manganese-based catalysts for converting carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, linking molecular structure to catalytic activity and overpotential.

Read the paper ↗

University of Michigan · 2018–2021

Molecular simulations of charge transfer kinetics

I used first-principles molecular dynamics and metadynamics simulations to investigate redox kinetics for vanadium flow batteries. These simulations helped explain how electrolyte anions mediate charge transfer and how their interactions with electrodes affect reaction rates.

Read the paper ↗