Yao and his lab, including research associate Yanliang Liang, who served as first author on the paper, began the work in 2013, after he was awarded $1 million from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) RANGE program to develop new battery technology. Other researchers involved in the project include Yan Jing, Saman Gheytani and Kuan-Yi Lee, all of UH, Ping Liu of the University of California-San Diego, and Antonio Faccheti of Northwestern University.