Linda Nazar facts for kids

Linda Faye Nazar is a top scientist who works with materials for batteries. She is a Senior Canada Research Chair (a special title for leading researchers) and a Distinguished Research Professor of Chemistry at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Professor Nazar creates new materials that help store and convert energy using chemical reactions, which is important for things like electric cars. She showed that special "woven" materials can make lithium-sulfur batteries hold more energy. In 2019, she received the Chemical Institute of Canada Medal, a major award for chemists in Canada.

Becoming a Scientist

Linda Faye Nazar became interested in chemistry after her first year of university. Her father was also a scientist and ran a business making jewellery.

Early Education

She studied chemistry at the University of British Columbia, earning her first degree in 1978.

Graduate Studies

After that, she went to the University of Toronto for her advanced studies. She completed her PhD in 1984, working with Professor Geoffrey Ozin.

Starting Her Career

After finishing her PhD, she worked as a researcher at Exxon Research and Engineering Company. In the late 1980s, she joined the University of Waterloo. This is where she started focusing on how electricity and chemistry work together, and on Inorganic chemistry, which studies materials that don't contain carbon.

Discovering New Materials

Professor Nazar works in materials chemistry at the University of Waterloo. Her main goal is to design better ways to store energy, especially for batteries.

Building Better Batteries

Her research team creates new materials and super tiny structures (called nanostructures) for lithium-sulfur batteries. These include special "interwoven composites" that are like tiny woven fabrics.

She also uses special tools to understand how the shape and structure of materials affect how well they store energy. These tools include nuclear magnetic resonance (which uses magnets to study atoms), electrochemistry (studying electricity and chemical reactions), and X-ray diffraction (using X-rays to see how atoms are arranged).

Leading in Nanotechnology

Professor Nazar helped start the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology. She is known as a "leading authority" in advanced materials. She was first given the special title of Canada Research Chair in 2004, and it was renewed in 2008 and 2012. In 2009, she was a special visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology. In 2013, she received a large grant of $1.8 million from the National Research Council to research energy storage materials for cars.

Beyond Lithium-ion Batteries

Professor Nazar is very interested in creating new types of batteries that are even better than the common lithium-ion batteries used in phones and electric cars. She also studies sodium-ion, zinc ion, and magnesium-ion batteries.

While lithium-ion batteries are popular for hybrid electric cars, there are worries about getting enough lithium in the future.

Improving Lithium-Sulfur Batteries

Her early work involved making carbon materials with tiny holes. These holes acted as frameworks for battery parts called cathodes, helping electricity flow better and allowing the batteries to hold more energy.

She showed that woven carbon materials could make lithium-sulfur batteries store more energy. She also found a way to create carbon frameworks with medium-sized holes. These holes could hold sulfur in place, which helped the batteries store energy better and work well over many uses.

Professor Nazar calculated that low-cost lithium-sulfur batteries could allow electric cars to travel twice as far as cars using current lithium-ion technology. Sulfur is easy to find and can replace expensive cobalt oxide in lithium-ion batteries.

However, sulfur can sometimes dissolve into the liquid part of the battery (called the electrolyte), which can cause problems. Also, these batteries can have high internal resistance and lose their ability to hold a charge over time. Professor Nazar's team found that creating tiny structures in the battery parts can help solve these issues.

They also found that woven materials made from manganese dioxide can help stabilize sulfur in lithium-sulfur batteries. These materials can help the batteries last for 2,000 charging and discharging cycles without losing much power.

Lithium-Oxygen Batteries

She has also worked on lithium-oxygen batteries. These batteries are light and can store a lot of energy. In these batteries, certain chemicals can cause the battery to break down. Professor Nazar found that if you change the liquid part of the battery to a molten salt and use a special metal oxide in one of the battery parts, these harmful chemicals don't form, which makes the battery last longer.

She has also researched supercapacitors (which store energy quickly) and polyanion materials.

Current Role

In 2016, she became a full Professor at the University of Waterloo. She continues to hold a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Solid State Energy Materials. Since 2014, Professor Nazar has been on the board of directors for the International Meeting on Li-Batteries. She also helps review articles for important science journals like Angewandte Chemie, Energy & Environmental Science, and the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

Awards and Honours

Professor Nazar has received many awards for her important work:

• 1978 Royal Society of Chemistry Undergraduate Award
• 2010 Canadian Society for Chemistry Rio Tinto Alcan Award for Electrochemistry
• 2011 International Battery Association Award
• 2011 Royal Society of Canada Fellowship
• 2012 International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Distinguished Women in Chemistry
• 2013 Society of German Chemists August-Wilhelm-von-Hofmann Lectureship
• 2014 Web of Science Most Highly Cited Researchers (meaning her work is often referenced by other scientists)
• 2014 Thomson Reuters World's Most Influential Scientific Minds
• 2015 Officer of the Order of Canada (a high honour in Canada)
• 2017 University of Waterloo Outstanding Performance Award
• 2018 Thomson Reuters Most Highly Cited Researchers
• 2019 Chemical Institute of Canada Medal
• 2020 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society (a very prestigious science academy in the UK)
• 2022 E.W.R. Steacie Award
• 2024 The Royal Society Hughes Medal