For Hugh Smith, the challenge of building an energy-secure future isn’t about creating the world’s “best” battery. It’s about designing the right battery for the right job. As a fifth-year PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Smith studies sodium-ion batteries, an emerging alternative to the lithium-ion batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles. By replacing expensive critical minerals like lithium, nickel, and cobalt with more readily available elements like sodium, iron, and manganese, his research aims to make energy storage both more affordable and more sustainable. “I’ve believed for a very long time that the biggest engineering problem humanity faces is the transition to clean energy,” Smith says. “Batteries are a critical bottleneck in that transition.” Growing up in Albany, New York, Smith was draw…

Smith’s graduate school journey has been defined as much by the process of learning how to do research as by the science itself. He joined a brand-new research group at MIT as its first graduate student, and helped establish the lab run by Professor Iwnetim Abate. Without senior graduate students or postdocs to turn to for day-to-day guidance, he often had to teach himself new techniques and how to troubleshoot when things went wrong. “I learned not to be fearful of new things,” Smith says. “Just because I didn’t know how to do something didn’t mean I couldn’t figure it out.” He says the experience transformed him into a more inde…