Postdoctoral Associate
hoconnor@mit.edu
Hugh obtained his MEng in Mechanical Engineering from Queen’s University Belfast in 2019, including a year in industry at Caterpillar Inc. as a Mechanical Design Engineer. He went on to complete his PhD in Chemical Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast in 2023 under Prof. Peter Nockemann, focusing on the design and modelling of flow battery cells to improve reactant distribution.
During his PhD, he designed a low-cost 3D-printed platform for cell manufacture, which he used to develop cell testing protocols. Hugh then continued his research there as a postdoctoral research fellow, working on all-liquid, all-iron flow battery chemistries. Under the mentorship of Dr. Josh Bailey, he co-led multi-institutional reproducibility studies with MIT investigating inter-laboratory variability in flow battery cell testing, and developed data infrastructure supporting more rigorous, comparable testing practices across the field.
In the Brushett Research Group at MIT, Hugh will continue this work alongside the development and scale-up of new flow battery chemistries for sustainable, scalable energy storage.