CEI Interdisciplinary Seminar: Jill Pestana, Battery Scientist & Engineer, Founder & CEO, Pestana Solutions
Signal and Noise: The Hidden Costs of Hype in the Battery Industry
When the CTO of one of the world's most technically credible solid-state battery companies pulls out his phone to ask you whether a competitor's voltage curve is physically possible, something has gone wrong — not with the technology, but with the environment the industry has built around it. In this talk, Jill Pestana examines how the battery industry's hype cycle extracts a hidden tax from the people doing serious work, how the funding environment that followed rewarded the wrong signals for long enough to do structural damage, and how Western policy responses to Chinese supply chain dominance keep misidentifying the problem they're trying to solve. Drawing on firsthand reporting from conferences in Korea, China, and the United States, and conversations with leading battery scientists and executives, Pestana argues that the bottleneck has moved — from chemistry, to capital, to systems, to workforce — and that closing the gap requires a…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Nanoengineering & Sciences Building (NAN). Campus room: Nano 181. Accessibility Contact: Danica Hendrickson, danicah@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Clean Energy Community and Anyone interested in Current Clean Energy Research.
Thursday, May 21, 2026, 4:00 PM – 4:50 PM.
CEI End of Year Seminar
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Nanoengineering & Sciences Building (NAN). Campus room: NAN 181. Accessibility Contact: Danica Hendrickson, danicah@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 28, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM.