Phillip K. Ridley
Senior Research Associate
CUNY Energy Institute, City College of New York
I am a battery materials scientist and engineer with 8+ years of experience driving innovation from fundamental research to commercial scale-up. I am currently a Senior Research Associate at the CUNY Energy Institute, City College of New York, where I work with Director & Prof. Sanjoy Banerjee, supporting research contracts with the US DOE Office of Electricity and NASA on grid modernization and advanced energy storage technologies.
Previously, I served as a Battery Materials and Manufacturing Supply Chain Fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy, working at the interface of battery materials development, manufacturing scale-up, and federal policy. I completed my Ph.D. in Nano Engineering at UC San Diego under Prof. Ying Shirley Meng, focusing on novel solid-state ion conductors for next-generation solid-state batteries.
I also run a small technical consultancy, helping engineering firms and deep-tech companies with battery materials development, manufacturing scale-up, R&D strategy, and technical grant writing.
View full CV — publications, patents, experience & education
My research focuses on lithium-ion & solid-state battery materials — particularly sulfide and halide solid electrolytes, sodium-ion conductors, and electrode–electrolyte interfaces. I am interested in advancing battery materials from fundamental discovery through proof-of-concept and toward commercial manufacturing.
More recently, my work has expanded into battery modeling, parameterization, and digital twin development for battery energy storage systems (BESS). This includes building physics-informed and data-driven models that capture cell- and pack-level behavior, fitting model parameters to experimental cycling and impedance data, and using these digital representations to inform performance forecasting, degradation analysis, and grid-scale deployment decisions.