Chemical engineering graduate student Ethan Self has received a DAAD Rise Fellowship. He will travel in June to Darmstadt, Germany, to work for six months at Merck KGaA.
Self, from Mattoon, Illinois, is a third-year doctoral student who works in the lab of Peter Pintauro, H. Eugene McBrayer Professor of Chemical Engineering. Self’s research is on nanofiber electrodes for batteries and fuel cells. His dissertation focuses on using electrospinning to create composite fiber electrodes for high-capacity Li-ion batteries. Self earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“In a broad sense I am working at Merck to create high-performance fuel cell electrodes using electrospinning. I will be working to scale up some of the materials developed in our lab,” Self said.
Merck KGaA is a German chemical and pharmaceutical company founded in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1668. In the United States and Canada the subsidiaries of Merck KGaA operate under the umbrella brand EMD.
The German Exchange Service (DAAD) is the largest German support organization in the field of international academic cooperation.
The DAAD is a private self-governing national agency of the institutions of higher education in Germany, representing 365 German higher education institutions. It offers competitive awards and merit-based grants for use toward study and research in Germany at accredited higher education institutions. It also awards grants to German students, doctoral students and scholars for studies and research abroad.