Pikul named Moore Inventor Fellow

10/18/2020 Maddie Yang

Written by Maddie Yang

James Pikul
James Pikul

MechSE alumnus James Pikul (BSME ’09, MSME ’11, PhDME ’15) spent 10 years in Urbana-Champaign pursuing his degrees from Illinois. He now works as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania where he leads the Pikul Research Group, studying soft robotics, high-powered batteries, and multifunctional cellular solids.

Pikul was recently named a Moore Inventor Fellow for his innovative work in robotics. Moore Inventor Fellowships are given to researchers working on new technologies that are likely to have large impacts in scientific discoveries, environmental conversation, and patient care. Out of 200 nominations, only five researchers were selected.

During his undergraduate years at Illinois, Pikul participated in Engineers Without Borders as well as the Acacia fraternity. He said that one of the most memorable things about his undergraduate experience was the people that he met. Pikul met many lifelong friends at Illinois, as well as his wife.

“We would spend a lot of time working on homework and solving problems with each other. That allowed me to develop really good friendships that I keep today,” he said.

Pikul also participated in the Hoeft Technology and Management (T&M) Program and benefited from the mentorship of Professor Steven Michael, who is co-director of the program.

“[The T&M Program] was a really awesome experience for me. It taught me many things, but it also made me think about the powerful combination of business and engineering. That combination is related to this Moore Inventor Fellowship, because the idea is not just 'Can you come up with interesting new science or understanding of something,' but it's 'can you invent something that one day can really make an impact in the world?'”

For his graduate work, Pikul worked with MechSE Professor Bill King and MatSE Professor Paul Braun. He said he decided to stay at Illinois for grad school because he loved the collaborative environment and the faculty. Pikul also had a Carver Fellowship and a Department of Energy (DoE) fellowship, allowing him to work with both professors.

“I went to grad school at Illinois, primarily because Bill King works at Illinois,” said Pikul, who had a strong interest in micro and nanotechnology, which is King’s specialty.

Pikul’s work at Illinois introduced him to working with batteries, an area he still studies. At Illinois, Pikul created a high-power battery that was the most powerful in the world at the time. While most batteries have to sacrifice energy for power, the batteries he designed could achieve high energy and still produce as much power as a supercapacitor.

Pikul is extremely passionate about sustainable energy and continued this passion into his post-doc and current research.

The Moore Fellowship is sponsoring his work on harvesters, an alternative to batteries. Harvesters take energy from their environment and convert it into electricity, which is benificial in portable and remote applications where replacing or recharging batteries is difficult and costly. While harvesters don’t require re-charging, they don’t produce a lot of power because most of the energy sources they harvest from often have low energy density.

“We're basically creating a technology that can consume high energy sources in the device’s environment. These high energy sources have strong chemical bonds, like metals and sugars, and we can extract that energy by reacting those materials with oxygen in a controlled fashion. This is similar to how humans and animals eat high energy sources and breath oxygen, it's taking advantage of the same potential difference, and we're turning that into electricity, which is going to power the electronic device.”

Despite his academic roots, Pikul has a strong interest in entrepreneurship. He chose to pursue grad school so that he could start his own tech company, but he ended up finding a place for his innovative tendencies in academia. Outside of his research, he has participated in multiple start-up ventures, many of which began during his time in Urbana-Champaign.

“Now I'm starting a company with some of my students on some of the core technology for this Moore Foundation award and thinking about how to apply it to provide back up power to grids in developing-world applications.”

Pikul wanted to reemphasize that Illinois is a wonderful place and offer current students some final words of advice: “Think about who are the people that really inspire you. Try to understand in today's world, what type of experiences they needed to become that person, and then try to follow that path, but in your own way.”


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This story was published October 18, 2020.