Dr Nina Balke

Nina Balke is an Associate Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department and the Director of the Analytical Instrumentation Facility at North Carolina State University (USA).

Nina’s research uses AFM to understand and discover new nanoscale materials’ functionality driven by electric fields for information and energy technology. This includes the study of electromechanical, mechanical and transport phenomena in inorganic materials and across fluid-solid interfaces.

Some of her most recent research investigates electro-chemo-mechanical coupling in supercapacitors and battery materials to develop mechanical analogs of current-based characterization techniques which can be applied on local scales to investigate heterogeneities of electrochemical reactions and ion transport.

Dr Nina Balke

Recent AFM-related papers:

• Schön, N., Schierholz, R., Jesse, S., Yu, S., Eichel, R-A., Balke, N. and Hausen, F. (2021). ‘Signal Origin of Electrochemical Strain Microscopy and Link to Local Chemical Distribution in Solid State Electrolytes’. Small Methods, 5(5), 2001279.

• Tsai, W-Y., Wang, R., Boyd, S., Augustyn, V. and Balke, N. (2021). ‘Probing local electrochemistry via mechanical cyclic voltammetry curves’. Nano Energy, 81, 105592.

• Tsai, W-Y., Come, J., Zhao, W., Wang, R., Feng, G., Thapaliya, B. P., Dai, S., Collins, L. and Balke, N. (2019). ‘Hysteretic order-disorder transitions of ionic liquid double layer structure on graphite’. Nano Energy, 60, pp. 886-893.

Biography: Nina completed her MSc and PhD in Materials Sciences from the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany) in 2006. Following this she became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Berkeley (USA) (2007-2009) studying multiferroic thin films for new device concepts in information storage using advances scanning probe techniques in the Ramesh group.

From 2009 to 2021, Nina has worked as a Postdoc and then staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory using scanning probe microscopy to study ferroelectrics and nanoscale ionic currents in energy storage materials, including lithium-ion batteries and electrochemical capacitors.

Since 2021, Nina has been an Associate Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department and the Director of the Analytical Instrumentation Facility at North Carolina State University (USA). Nina is also the recipient of both the Microscopy Today Innovation Award (2011) for her involvement in developing new characterisation techniques for energy storage electrode materials and the Department of Energy Early Career Research Award (2011) for her research on energy processes in lithium-ion battery materials.

Website: Balke Research Group - Department of Materials Science and Engineering (ncsu.edu)

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Also, check out our previous March 2021 Women in AFM blog post to read about more researchers. Why are we celebrating women in AFM? — NuNano AFM Probes