Jennifer Rupp


Jennifer L. M. Rupp is the Thomas Lord Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work considers solid-state materials for energy and information devices, including batteries, neuromorphic memory and computing logic.

Early life and education

Rupp was born in Germany in 1980. Her mother was a language teacher, her father was a physicist and her aunt an active feminist. She played piano as a child and struggled to choose between pursuing physics or music. She eventually studied mineralogy and crystallography at the University of Vienna. Her undergraduate efforts were recognised by the Austrian Chemical Society, who presented her with their prize for her diploma thesis. She earned her doctoral degree at ETH Zurich. She was appointed as a group leader there in 2007, where she studied crystallisation kinetics in solid state ionic conductors and solid-oxide fuel cells. She was awarded the ETH Zurich medal for PhD excellence. In 2011 she joined the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, where she learned how to make oxide memristors and protonic fuel cells. She left after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. In 2012 Rupp joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked briefly as a senior scientist, and specialised in solid-oxide fuel cells and started to investigate resistive switching. She worked with Harry Tuller and Bilge Yildiz. Rupp returned to ETH Zurich and worked there until 2016. She was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation starting grant on materials functionalisation.

Research and career

In 2012 Rupp was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship on resistance switching memories. Here she launched and directed the electrochemical materials group. The group developed lithium batteries and solid-state thin film batteries for portable electronics, as well as investigating structure-property relationships in these energy materials including perovskites. She has focussed on solar to fuel materials, which use solar-powered thermochemical water and carbon dioxide splitting. She has studied solid oxide fuel cells that can be incorporated onto a chip, and include.a free-standing membrane that separates a fuel from an air supply.
Her contributions have been into electrochemomechanics; the interactions of the ionic charge transport, oxygen non-stoichiometry and membrane strain. She created a perovskite-based memristor in 2015, with three stable resistive states that can encode data as a 0, 1 or 2. In 2016 Rupp demonstrated a fast charging solid lithium-ion battery that did not involve liquids or gels. This can overcome problems of batteries igniting, due to thermal runaway, when the lithium makes contact with air. The fast charging occurs because there is greater contact between the anode and the electrolyte than in conventional batteries.
She moved back to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016, where she has worked on lithium ceramic electrolyte conductors for safe and efficient batteries. At MIT Rupp works on solid-state materials for energy devices including solar cells and solar-to-synthetic fuel conversion. She is also interested in neuromorphic memories and computing logic. She has delivered plenary talks at the Royal Society and Gordon Research Conference.

Awards and honours

Her awards and honours include;
Rupp is Associate Editor of the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.