Tolbert Lab

Group photo this year- teletolbies 2024!

We are so happy for our wonderful graduates of 2025 David Pe (not photographed), Spencer Hamilton, Susan Ju, and Alex Simafranca!! 🎉🎓 They have been the most wonderful labmates over the years and will be very missed♥️

Our group has been collaborating with the Raman, Pilon, and Dunn groups to develop a new material for radiative cooling by making a gel capable of redirecting heat into the sky. You can see our awesome teammates at work in the video! @uclachem @cnsiatucla youtube.com/watch?v=PG20q4…

Our awesome first year Miguel Reyna was rewarded the 2025 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and we are so excited for him! Looking forward to seeing his growth as an amazing researcher over the next years! 🎉🎉 #NSFGRFP @NSF @uclachem @UCLA

We are excited we got to show some of our latest work on nanoporous Na&Li-ion batteries from our amazing leader Dr. Sarah Tolbert at MRS! We also have more talks to come from some of our labmates who are presenting their work on semiconducting polymers! @Materials_MRS #S25MRS

Going to 2025 MRS spring meeting & exhibit in Seattle? Come check out our talks! @Materials_MRS #S25MRS

Congratulations to our wonderful labmates Spencer Hamilton and Susan Ju for giving their exit talk! They have accomplished amazing work in our lab on diverse applications including super hard materials, radiative cooling, and fast charging batteries. We will miss them dearly!

Congratulations to our grad student, David Pe, and undergrad, Linnea Shu, for winning top 5 presenters at the Undergraduate/Graduate Research Symposium by the Southern California Local Section of the American Chemical Society (SCALACS)!

Check out our paper published in Chem Mater, showing that electrochemically-formed disordered rock salt from V9Mo6O40 undergoes a single-step transformation pathway and forms an unusual highly distorted lamellar microstructure providing insight on its fast charging mechanism.

🥳Congratulations to Prof. Sarah Tolbert @TolbertLab for being awarded the ACS Southern California Section’s (@SCALACS1) highest honor, the 2023 Richard C. Tolman Award Medal! @uclaphyssci @uclanewsroom chemistry.ucla.edu/news/2023-tolm…

Congrats to Casey Cornwell for giving his exit talk today on nanostructured cathode materials! He is an amazing scientist and lab mate who will be greatly missed.

Congrats to Helen, who gave her exit seminar yesterday! She is a wonderful labmate and we are excited to see what fantasic science she pursues in the future!

The 2023 Tolman Award recipient is Professor Sarah H. Tolbert, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles for her research in Nanoscience and Materials Chemistry. Congratulations, Professor Tolbert! #scalacs #tolmanaward

In our recent paper published in Chemistry of Materials, we showed doping low-cost amorphous regiorandom P3HT with large dodecaborane clusters results in partial ordering, improved carrier delocalization, and increased conductivity! pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.10…

Our collab with the Schwartz lab finds that two polymorphs of the same conjugated polymer in the same rub aligned film experience different levels of structural change after doping, leading to variations in conductivity. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

Check out our recent paper published in ACS Nano where we show faster charging and longevity can be achieved through suppression of Li-insertion phase transitions by using particle size to control phase behavior and kinetics! pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

Congratulations to all! Celebrate all day Long (!) wherever you happen to be.

Group photo this year-- Barbenheimer!

Congratulations to @NAkmansen for passing her candidacy exam!