Mike Whittaker is a research scientist in the Energy Geoscience Division in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an affiliate in the department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is the Co-Founder and Director of the Lithium Resource Research and Innovation Center (LiRRIC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whose mission is to power the resource-to-recharge revolution. We are accelerating the transition to renewable energy by enabling the efficient use of unconventional domestic resources. LiRRIC scientists leverage a deep knowledge of environmental systems to develop efficient and sustainable extraction technologies, and use these technologies to establish supply chains for the advanced manufacturing of next-generation energy storage materials. LiRRIC promotes energy justice through life cycle assessment and techno economic analysis that help ensure that the shovel-ready solutions we develop are equitable for all.
He received BS/MS degrees from the University of Utah in Materials Science and Engineering in 2012, and Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Materials Science and Engineering in 2017 with advisor Derk Joester. Mike worked as a postdoc in the nanogeoscience group in the Energy Geoscience Division from 2017-2020 with Benjamin Gilbert and with Jill Banfield at UCB.