Research Fellow in Sustainable batteries for seamless textile electronics for healthcare

Flexible batteries with seamless integration in textiles will revolutionize the healthcare system. Such batteries could power sensors to continuously monitor vital signals (e.g. glucose) and antennas to immediately transmit the information to a medical doctor when urgent action is required. However, such batteries need to be completely safe and non-toxic, as well as energy dense and lightweight; requirements that are often conflicting.

The SUSTAIN programme grant (www.sustain-pg.org) will address this challenge using water, lithium and special polymer fabrics to build the batteries. Compared to traditional batteries that use toxic organic solvents and salts, the SUSTAIN batteries will operate using non-toxic lithium-conductive hydrated polymers that enable high deformability and stretchability.

Via collaborative work with leading textile designers, experts in printed electronics and wireless communications and sustainability analysts, the SUSTAIN program will build working demonstrations of textile electronics that can act as wearable doctors.

This post is suitable for chemists or materials scientists with a PhD (awarded or imminent) in chemistry, materials science or a closely related discipline or equivalent qualification and experience.

Although the current funding for this vacancy is for 2 years, we expect to be able to extend the contract further, and there is flexibility about the start date.

For informal enquiries about the project, please contact Prof. Nuria Garcia-Araez (N.Garcia-Araez@soton.ac.uk).