Are you curious about careers in science?

Hi.

I'm Olivia, and today I'm here with Rana Mohtadi.

Rana, can you tell us where we are and what you do?

I'm a senior principal scientist at Toyota.

I work on developing materials for batteries that can be hopefully implemente in our vehicles in the future.

What are some tools and equipment that you use?

We have lots of fun and cool equipment we use to allow us to peek into our materials, to see things we cannot see with the naked eye.

Now we are here at the microscopy lab if you want to take a look.

Yes.

This device is called scanning electron microscopy.

And we use this handl to push the material deep inside we see something like that.

How is STEM involved in your work?

We have physics.

We have math.

We have chemistry.

So we need all of these tools to do our materials research.

There's lots of chemistry happening here.

Sometimes even we run our chemical reactions here in this glovebox.

So how do batteries actually work?

They allow us to store energy in the form of electricity.

Here we have what we call a pouch cell type of battery.

Everything is lying flat here.

One side is the negative and another side is the positive electrode.

You put these together, you put in the liquids, and you just seal it off.

Does that battery actually work?

Oh, yeah, it does work.

And if you have many of them you can even run a car.

Yeah.

Wow.

Car batteries.

Depending on what they do they tend to be bigger, heavier.

And they need to have more energy in them compared to your double or triple AA batteries you have at home.

What excites me more about my work is creating new materials that will allow us to have cleaner environment and improve the future of all humanity.

Never be shy of asking questions and learning.

I feel powered up from learning about batteries with Rana Mohtadi.

Explore your possibilities.