PI: Progna Banerjee, Ph.D.

Progna Banerjee, Ph.D. is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of the department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at Loyola University Chicago (since 2024), affiliate faculty of the department of Bioinfomatics (since 2025) and visiting faculty appointee at the DOE Argonne National Laboratory’s Center for Nanoscale Materials (since 2026). She leads the PBEnergyLab. Recognized as a 2026 Materials Au Rising Star, her research bridges physics, synthetic inorganic chemistry, nanocrystal science, electrochemistry, and advanced characterization to study ion-transport materials and interfaces.
Prior to Loyola, Banerjee was a NST Center postdoctoral appointee at The Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) at Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois, USA (2021–2024), where she developed electron microscopy–driven approaches to map ionic transport and nanoscale phase transitions in energy materials. She previously held two prestigious fellowships: the NSF MRSEC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA (2020–2021), where she studied light–matter interactions in bioinspired nanostructures as part of a DoD MURI; and the EBI–Shell ALS Postdoctoral Fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, USA (2019–2020), where she studied PLD-based thin-film solid-state batteries.
Banerjee earned her Ph.D. in Physics (with a focus on Materials Chemistry, 2018) and M.S. in Condensed Matter Physics (2014) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA. She also holds an M.Tech. in Solid State Technology and an M.Sc. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
Her work has appeared in leading journals including Nano Letters, Nature Communications, Chemistry of Materials, and Angewandte Chemie. She develops data-guided workflows for discovering and characterizing complex ionic materials.

FELLOWSHIPS, HONORS AND AWARDS

Since independent Principal Investigator
2026 – Selected as a 2026 Rising Star in Materials Science by ACS Materials Au: Invited contribution to the Rising Stars collection (in preparation)
2025 – Research Support Grant Competition Award, Office of Research Services – Advanced Structural and Compositional Characterization of Colloidal Copper Boron Selenide Nanocrystals for Superionic Conductors

Selected Awards from Post-Ph.D. & Pre-Ph.D.
2022 – American Chemical Society–CAS Future Leader (1 of 30 awardees worldwide, across all chemistry disciplines)
2021–2024 – Postdoctoral Appointee, Center for Nanoscale Materials (Argonne National Laboratory; 1 of 8 postdocs selected annually)
2021 – ACS Postdoc-to-Faculty Future Faculty Scholar
2020–2021 – Postdoctoral Fellow, NSF MRSEC, University of Texas at Austin
2019–2020 – EBI–Shell ALS Affiliated Postdoctoral Fellow, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

2018 – Scott Anderson Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award, Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

pre-2014 – Earlier, at IIT Kharagpur, Prof. Banerjee earned national top-percentile distinction in India’s GATE and JAM physics examinations and received the Hiron Bala Memorial Gold Medal for the highest academic performance across all departments in her college. Her pre-doctoral training was further supported by competitive national and international fellowships, including the Indian Academy of Sciences Summer Research Fellowship, the SIPIS Summer Fellowship at the National University of Singapore, and the Government of India MHRD Institute Fellowship.

PBEnergyLab in motion

Spring 2026: PBEnergyLab postdoc and students at recent conferences and symposiums to present their work! O.S. presented his first author electrocatalysis work at the 18th AIChE Midwest Regional Conference! Current Provost/Mulcahy fellowship holders I.C. and S.C. presented their work at the CAS URES symposium!

Fall 2025/Winter 2026: (L to R) Prof. Banerjee (invited talk: D03-1245: Mechanistic Insights into Quantum Dot Transformations for Enhancement in Ionic Conductivity in Solid Li-Ion Battery Electrolytes) and PBEnergyLab students (contributed poster) at the 248th Electrochemical Society conference (Oct 2025) and at the MateriAlZ Winter School (Jan 2026).

Recent student and postdoc recognitions to PBEnergyLab members

• 2026-2027 Interdisciplinary Fellowship (B.H. – Synthetic Discovery of Nanocrystal Solid Electrolytes with S-Relevant Performance Metrics)
• 2026-2027 Mulcahy Fellowship (M.P. – AI/ML assisted inverse design of synthetic space in nanoionics)
• 2026 Provost Fellowship Scholar (C.W. – Study of the Self-Assembly of Nanocrystals at the Air-Ligand Interface)
• 2026 CAS-USRE Fellowship (K.K. – AI/ML assisted inverse design of synthetic space in nanoionics)
• 2026 18th Annual AIChE Midwest Regional Conference (O.S. presented first author work on electrocatalysis)
• 2025 Provost Fellowship Scholar (I.C. -project on data-driven correlation of morphology changes in lithiated colloidal superionics)
• 2025-2026 Mulcahy Fellowship (S.C. – project on calorimetric characterization of nanoscale superionic nanocrystals)
• 2025 Student Award from the American Institute of Chemists (AIC) (Y.X. -project on Cu–B–Se phase mapping)
• 2025 ACS postdoc to faculty workshop (O.S.)
• Participation in international conferences (248th electrochemical society-2025; 7th AIChE-American Institute of Chemical Engineers Battery and Energy Storage Conference-2025) and workshops (CCP4/APS School in Macromolecular Crystallography workshop-2025 and MateriAlZ Winter School-2026).

PBEnergyLab alumni – PBEnergyLab alumni have contributed to peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, and data-guided nanoionics projects.

• Xu, Y. (2024-2025: MS student) Currently in Birmingham Medical School, co-author in peer-reviewed articles J22, J23, J25, J26
• Zervos, K. (2024-2025: MS student) Currently Materials Chemist at Molecular Interfaces, co-author in peer-reviewed articles J22, J23