Dr. Alice Merryweather is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of illumion, a start-up dedicated to transforming battery research through advanced optical microscopy. During her PhD at the University of Cambridge, Alice developed a novel methodology for real-time imaging of ion transport in battery materials, allowing dynamic processes to be observed at the single-particle level and with sub-second temporal resolution. Along with co-founders Christoph Schnedermann, Clare Grey and Akshay Rao, she launched illumion in December 2022 with the aim of making this technique widely accessible to the battery research community as a benchtop scientific instrument.
In the past 2 years, illumion has successfully developed the ‘illumionONE’ – a benchtop instrument that enables researchers to visualise and analyse electrodes during their operation, to examine particle-to-particle heterogeneity, particle volume changes, mechanical degradation and fundamental ion intercalation processes. In December 2024, illumion achieved the milestone of shipping its first illumionONE device to a customer, and is continuing to sell instruments and to innovate the technology.
Alice holds an undergraduate degree in chemistry and physics from the University of Durham, and an MRes in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology from the University of Cambridge. Her PhD research at the Cavendish Laboratory and the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry in Cambridge was recognized with the Cavendish Prize in Experimental Physics. Following completion of her PhD, Alice is also the Henry Sidgwick Research Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge.
