UW ChemE start-up Battery Informatics has done it again - this time, winning the Clean Energy Institute's (CEI) Clean Energy Prize at the 2018 Alaska Airlines Environmental Innovation Challenge (EIC). The team of UW ChemE  and Foster School of Business students was awarded $5,000 for their creation of valuation algorithms to give customers the ability to increase the life and performance of their energy storage projects involving lithium-ion batteries. This is their 3rd major win at the EIC, with an honorable mention in 2015, and a JARL (Judges Also Really Liked) award in 2016.

Battery Informatics, Inc. (Bii) was co-founded in 2015 by Matt Murbach. In 2017, Murbach was was among Forbes Magazines' 30 under 30 in Energy for his work as Bii's Chief Technology Officer. The company's innovative work with re-purposing of used bus batteries to bring power to remote locations was among UW ChemE and CEI projects that were featured in a recent story in the New York Times. 

A PhD candidate in the Electrochemical Materials and Interfaces lab, Matt was an inaugural trainee in the Big Data and Data Science IGERT program and a Clean Energy Institute (CEI) graduate fellow. He was also the founding president of the Electrochemical Society (ECS) student chapter at UW and co-organized the first ECS Data Science Hack Day to create a community of electrochemical data scientists. He works with ChemE Profs. Daniel Schwartz and Venkat Subramanian.