The U.S. Department of Energy has selected Rose Cersonsky, the Conway Assistant Professor in chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to receive a 2026 DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program award.
The award provides $875,000 in support over five years for outstanding early-career scientists at U.S. academic institutions and DOE national laboratories. The goal of these awards is to stimulate new research that has the potential to deliver the fundamental scientific discoveries and major scientific tools needed to transform our understanding of nature and advance the energy, economic and national security of the United States.
In her research project, Cersonsky will investigate how to use electric fields to control crystal formation. This could help improve the speed, quality and efficiency of developing important materials like advanced semiconductors and sensors.
“When a molecule wants to crystallize, it often has multiple choices of what it can do,” explains Cersonsky. “For instance, think of carbon. It can crystallize into graphite, graphene or even diamond. These are all forms of matter that are just carbon, but with different connectivity and phases, or polymorphs. This can be beneficial because there a lot of things molecules can do, but very often they don’t make the form we want them to.”
Typically, controlling the crystallization of organic molecules means fussing with the temperature or adding solvents or other chemicals. This is not ideal, since those additions can change the whole chemistry of a system, leading to unpredictable outcomes.
That’s why Cersonsky is looking into ways to manage crystal formation by exposing molecules to electric fields instead. Using simulations and computational techniques, she and her students will look at the ways electric fields propagate through the crystallization process to develop an understanding of how electric fields can (and cannot) manipulate molecular chemistry.
This type of work, she says, has only been feasible in the last two years, with the advent of AI tools and improved simulation. Previously, simulating the long crystallization time scales and the tiny fluctuations of energy were beyond conventional computing. But the newest AI tools can capture the long timeframe and nuance of the interactions.
The group will begin by looking at model chemical systems, including benzene and its derivatives, to develop a basic understanding of how the process works. Cersonsky says she has contacted potential partners to experimentally evaluate the findings when the time is right.
At the end of the project, she hopes her team will have developed a deep enough understanding to build a framework to predict the electro-crystallization process. “The hope is that if you show me a molecule, I can tell you whether or not its crystallization behavior will be fundamentally changed by putting it under an electric field,” Cersonsky says. “And we want to know if we can make more pristine crystallization products of the highly polarized or electronically conductive crystals important in next generation of energy and technology devices.”