Kristin Aslaug Persson is a Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She obtained her Ph.D in Theoretical Physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden in 2001 under the supervision of Goran Grimvall. As recognition of her work and in support of her future career, she received the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Early Career Award for Women in Science. Kristin pursued a postdoc at MIT for Gerbrand Ceder until joining LBNL in 2008.
At LBNL, Kristin leads The Materials Project, which she co-founded with Gerbrand Ceder at MIT. She is the Director of the 2012 BES-funded ‘Materials Project Center for Functional Electronic Materials Design’ and the PI of the Crosscutting Thrust of the recently launched JCESR hub. Kristin is also a PI of the Advanced Battery Materials Research (BMR) program and has co-founded the clean-energy start-up Pellion Technologies Inc., recipient of an ARPA-E award in 2010 for developing high-energy rechargeable magnesium batteries.
Kristin’s research interests have ranged over the years from phonon-related structural instabilities, structure prediction in alloys, pressure-induced spin transitions, alkaline batteries, high-throughput materials discovery, to dissolution of solids in aqueous media but today she mainly focuses on materials for energy generation and storage applications.