Maria Christina Lampe-Önnerud is a Swedishinorganic chemist, battery-inventor and entrepreneur. She has founded the companies Boston-Power Inc. and Cadenza Innovation. She is developing batteries for use in computers, electric vehicles and grid storage. She has received a number of awards, including the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneer Award in 2010, and is an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Lampe-Önnerud is a woman of many talents including opera singing, jazz dance, cellist, choral director, and mother.
Biography
Early life
Christina Lampe-Önnerud was born in Sweden. Her father, Wolfgang Lampe, was a power engineer. Lampe-Önnerud had an interest in science early on, making fireworks in a basement bathtub and playing with chemistry and electrical kits as a child. She was also trained as an opera singer.
Education
Lampe-Önnerud considered careers in opera singing and medicine and was offered a scholarship for an 8-year program for a medical doctorate degree but turned it down her senior year of high school. After high school Lampe-Önnerud accepted a scholarship to attend Elmira College in New York. At Elmira college she studied English literature, business, and the sciences while working in a chemistry laboratory as a lab assistant. With encouragement from her father to pursue a career in a STEM field and her growing interest in the sciences, Lampe-Önnerud returned to Sweden and obtained a B.Sc. in Chemistry and Calculus and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from Uppsala University in Sweden. In her masters program at Uppsala, Lampe-Önnerud studied copper deposition on semiconductor wafers and for her Ph.D. she focused on analyzing cathode materials for lithium-polymer batteries while working with a Denmark battery producer, Danionics, who later patented some of the materials Lampe- Önnerud studied. Lampe-Önnerud then held a postdoctoral appointment at MIT in Cambridge, MA working for Quantum Energy Technologies.
Personal life
Lampe-Önnerud is married to Per Önnerud – they met in high school – and they have two children, Anna-Marie and Mattias.
Career
Lampe-Önnerud has focused her career on energy storage since her time at Uppsala University, where her father had an interest in power generation. While still a doctoral student, Lampe-Önnerud patented a material to increase the power of lithium batteries. She joined Bell Communications Research in New Jersey in 1995, as a director and senior scientist, working on prototypes for thin-film polymer lithium batteries. She later became one of the youngest partners at Arthur D. Little, in charge of the company's battery labs. She founded the lithium-ion battery company Boston-Power Inc. in 2005 and owned the company until 2012 working as the CEO, executive chairman, and international chairman. The company focused on lithium-ion batteries for small personal computing devices. In 2012, she and her husband Per Önnerud started the company Cloteam later renamed Cadenza Innovation, and based in Oxford, Connecticut. Her work aims at developing efficient, safe, lasting, and inexpensive batteries for various technologies, including computers, phones, and cars. The lithium ion battery she invented is the first to be considered environmentally friendly while capable of providing long lasting energy safely to various types of technology. She describes Cadenza's 2016 battery design, which involves a ceramic insert in an aluminum container, as "an energy LEGO-brick for engineers". It is intended to be a power source for electric vehicles such as Tesla's cars, but could also be used in electrical grids. Lampe-Önnerud continues to serve as the chief executive officer and director at Cadenza. As of May 24, 2016, Lampe-Önnerud has served as the non-executive director of Syrah Resources Limited, an Australian-based company focusing on minerals and technology for industrial use. Lampe-Önnerud has served as a voice for power and energy issues at government and industrial conferences for over 15 years. She holds 15 patents currently and has 6 pending patents.
Published works
"Conference Paper: Opportunities in energy storage due to the paradigm shift fueled by the mobile and clean tech revolutions"
"A Consumer Revolution"
"Benchmark study on high performing carbon anode material"
"Conference Paper: Safety studies of Li-ion key components by ARC"
"Conference Paper: Safety studies on lithium-ion batteries by accelerating rate calorimetry"
Uppsala University Dissertation
"Chemical and Electrochemical Intercalation of Lithium Into a V6O13 Host"
