Veronika Šedajová gains experience in a top laboratory at Drexel University

The PhD student Veronika Šedajová devotes herself to studying hybrid materials for energy storage at Drexel University in Philadelphia. More than four months of her internship will be completed in a research group of the world’s leading expert in material chemistry, Yuri Gogotsi, who lectured in 2018 in Olomouc as part of Rudolf Zahradník Lecture Series.

Professor Gogotsi focuses, among other things, on the study of MXens, which offer wide applications in sensors, energy storage or water remediation technologies, as well as optoelectronics and medicine. It is a new class of 2D carbide- and nitride-based structures. The aim of the collaboration with RCPTM is to jointly develop hybrid materials to find applications in high-efficiency supercapacitors.

Veronika Šedajová, who is currently broadening her experience at Drexel University, has also been involved in the research.

“I will learn here the synthesis of MXens, their modification, then the process of preparing electrodes and various ways of testing. We are trying to combine the properties of our fluorografene derivatives with MXenes and obtain new nanomaterials suitable for supercapacitors, for example,” said the PhD student, who is also a member of Professor Otyepka’s ERC grant team.

Her first impressions of the internship are very positive. “Colleagues are great; I immediately started participating in the operation of the entire research group. So far, I’ve been most surprised by the number of online group meetings during the week when there’s at least a half-hour scientific discussion nearly every day. Over the next few weeks, I will complete the training, prepare my own MXene and begin work on preparing flexible electrodes from hybrid materials,” said the young scientist.

The first contact with Professor Gogotsi was made by the then RCPTM Director Radek Zbořil at the Czech-American Conference in Prague in January 2018. Subsequently, this American scientist of Ukrainian origin lectured in Olomouc on MXenes — Synthesis, Properties and Applications of Two-Dimensional Carbides and Nitrides, the Largest Family of 2D Materials. The lecture is available on https://www.rcptm.com/lectures/prof-yury-gogotsi/.