: This Scientist’s Work on Lithium-ion Battery Safety Helped Keep NASA Astronauts Safe #IndiaNEWS #Science This article has been sponsored by Underwriters Laboratories Inc. Dr Judy Jeevarajan considers

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This Scientist’s Work on Lithium-ion Battery Safety Helped Keep NASA Astronauts Safe #IndiaNEWS #Science
This article has been sponsored by Underwriters Laboratories Inc.

Dr Judy Jeevarajan considers herself grateful to have grown up around inspiring women. A common virtue she noticed in her mother and her grandmother was their perseverance and zeal to work hard — a mantra she has since religiously followed on her path to success.
From a wide-eyed teenager connecting the world around her with concepts printed in her science books to becoming a trailblazer NASA scientist and an expert on battery safety with a focus on lithium-ion cells, Dr Judy has come a long way — becoming an inspiration. Today, she is the vice president and executive director of the Electrochemical Safety Research Institute at Underwriters Laboratories Inc.

“I’ve been interested in science since I was a kid and that passion for it never really faded through the years, thanks to the amazing teachers I had in school and college. But more than that, it was my passion to solve a problem that I think has continued to motivate me,� says Dr Judy, for whom every problem is a story waiting to be unfurled.
Her journey from becoming an expert in battery safety to joining NASA is the perfect example of this.
Batteries in Space

“When I finished graduate school with a PhD in Electrochemistry, I got a job in a small business company and my first project was to make room temperature, ionic, liquid electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries. That was my first introduction into the field of batteries, whereby I spent a year as a post-doctorate at Texas A & M University, working on a NASA project on lithium-ion batteries. At the time, I had no direction and was just asked to study them. Lithium-ion batteries, at the time, were very new and their optimisation and commercialisation were at a nascent stage. I started gathering cells from Sony, Sanyo, Panasonic, SAFT and so on and studying them in my lab. I also began to make my own electrodes and tried to set up a glove box,� she says.
It was around the same time that her husband got a job as a NASA contractor and they had to move to Houston. Her knowledge and expertise with lithium-ion batteries finally landed her a job over one weekend as a NASA contractor, and thus began her journey.
To work on batteries that were to be flown in a human-operated space flight was an interesting and exciting opportunity for her, one that she took very seriously.
“When I was there [at NASA], we had a zero-tolerance policy. These batteries were being flown in space for a human-rated environment, in a confined space. I took it very seriously because there were lives at stake. For the crew members, it was a high-risk situation if there was a fire and as the team of scientists behind it, we had to ensure that safety was our top priority.

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