#FaradayPathways James Le Houx, ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
James has been closely involved with the Faraday Institution community for many years and has recently been awarded the Faraday ISIS Emerging Leader Battery Fellowship. His exciting career has led him from a degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southampton to the role of Beamline Scientist at Diamond Light Source. He shares with us the value being proactive and saying yes to opportunities.
James owes his initial passion for science to the mentorship he received at school.
“I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I was younger, but I was lucky to have had an excellent physics teacher called Dan Fendley, who encouraged me to choose physics at A level and pursue engineering at university. He really inspired me and believed in me when I felt lost.”
James studied his integrated master’s in mechanical engineering at the University of Southampton. Alongside his degree, he pursued his interest in racing cars by being team leader for the University of Southampton ‘Formula Student’ team. In his fourth year, he took this a step further and by undertaking a placement year designing gearboxes for racing cars at Xtrac, designed for use in the Le Mans 24-hour Endurance race.
“I was obsessed with designing and building cars and liked the idea of working in motorsport on precision science, at the cutting edge of human innovation. This placement year was an exciting experience with very intense deadlines. I was mostly focusing on Computer Aided Design (CAD) work, but if I had any questions about the designs, I could run downstairs to the car factory and talk to anyone working on the machines. I also got free race tickets, which was a plus!”
During his placement year, James’s undergraduate supervisor, Professor Andrew Cruden, contacted him about the opportunity to pursue a PhD as part of the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) he was leading, focused on energy storage research. James decided to stay at the University of Southampton and undertake a PhD.
“While I was working in Le Mans, they’d recently introduced the idea of the kinetic energy recovery system. This is a system where when the car brakes, the kinetic energy is stored in an on-board energy store, ready to deployed later in the lap, but the rules didn’t specify what the energy store could be. The three top teams came up with completely different solutions: Toyota were using a supercapacitor bank, Audi using a mechanical flywheel system and Porsche were using a lithium-ion battery pack. After 24 hours of racing, all three cars finished within a lap of each other, using completely different energy storage technologies. The PhD felt like the perfect opportunity to explore these different methods and try and push the technology further.”
James’s PhD research investigated the process of thermal runaway in lithium batteries, where, under extreme scenarios, a battery can enter an exothermic chain reaction, which can result in an explosion or fire. He was trying to design a chemical structure to prevent this from happening. To help achieve this, James used X-ray computer tomography (CT), which enables the capturing of multiple 3D images of batteries.
“I was interested in how different parameters inside the batteries were changing as the chemical structure changed. However, after using X-ray CT I realised that I needed a computational simulation to understand what was going on and to make predictions. At the time there was no way to do this at the scale needed, so I taught myself software engineering and designed my own software program called OpenImpala. This involved sitting in my bedroom in Southampton writing countless lines of code, and amazingly it ended up working!”
How did James find the process of doing a PhD?
“I really enjoyed the freedom and creativity of deciding what I could work on and being able to wake up one day with an idea and pursue it. However, it did have ups and downs. It can be challenging being the only person working on a particular problem, as you can’t just Google the answer. I was lucky to have a group around me who were also working on PhDs related to energy storage, so we were going through a similar process and could talk about the science and the challenges.”
James had the opportunity to work in consultancy alongside his PhD, where he put together white papers, prepared research documents for SMEs and advised government bodies on engineering problems.
“It was nice to work on these consulting projects during my PhD as they were self-contained, shorter periods of work, whereas the PhD can stretch out for a long time.”
Despite finishing his PhD in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, James was able to secure an exciting post-doctoral researcher position through presenting his work at an online conference.
“While I was presenting, I could see on the Zoom call that there was only one person in attendance. I was thinking, ‘Is there any point in me doing this?’ But at the end of the presentation that one person, Sharif Ahmed, started asking me lots of questions about my software and said that it would be of great benefit to the organisation he was part of. It turned out that Sharif worked at Diamond Light Source.”
In 2021, Sharif recruited James to a postdoctoral researcher position at Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility, located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.
The position was funded by the Ada Lovelace Centre, as part of a scheme to develop computational tools for high performance computing. He then went on to another postdoc position focused more on experimentation called INFUSE, a collaboration between Imperial College and Diamond.
“I went from using a tiny machine in Southampton to using an X-ray microscope that’s almost the size of a football stadium, which was incredibly exciting.”
In May 2023, James was promoted to the role of Beamline Scientist, a position he held until January 2024. This involved him supporting scientists who were performing experiments onsite at the synchrotron and helping to develop new techniques.
“I really enjoy working with this diverse set of scientists, who are all brilliantly intelligent. We have worked on everything from soil science and meteorites, to catalysis, and additive manufacturing. I am also able to utilise my background in software engineering to assist scientists with data analysis. It is very rewarding to see the software I wrote being used on such a broad scale.”
For 11 of the 33 beamlines at Diamond, James also helped to lead the battery research. There are battery research groups working there from universities all over the country, including UCL, Manchester, Warwick and Cambridge.
“I am very passionate about battery research. My dream is to develop more sustainably sourced, multivalent batteries, like zinc ion and aluminum ion batteries.
“The Diamond Light Source is an excellent place to carry out battery research because the X-rays from the synchrotron enable us to probe each of the different length scales of batteries, from the atomic level to the nanometer and millimeter. This allows us to obtain important chemical, structural and crystallographic information, so we can understand the processes occurring in batteries. This information can then be used to help tackle industrial battery challenges like energy density, power density, thermal safety and reducing costs.
“The things that can be achieved at Diamond, you can’t really achieve anywhere else in the country, or in some cases, anywhere else in the world. We have a real opportunity to assist in the clean energy transition.”
In February 2024, James was awarded the prestigious Faraday ISIS Emerging Leader Battery Fellowship and made the move to ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, also based at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus.
“With this fellowship, I am trying to bring together the battery researchers across the 27 universities of the Faraday Institution and that use the national facilities: ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, the Diamond Light Source, and the Central Laser Facility. There are around 60 different scientific instruments at these facilities that can be utilised for battery research. We want to build a coherent strategy around the use of these facilities to help tackle the goals of the Faraday Institution and wider Faraday Battery Challenge, including improving battery recyclability, safety and power density.”
James has been involved with the Faraday Institution from its early stages and was on the Scientific Programme Committee for the 2023 Faraday Institution Conference.
“It was great to bring everyone together at the conference in Birmingham, and you get to see the incredible breadth of research that is happening within the battery community. The first battery event that I attended had a conference room of 40 people, and this year there were 500 researchers in attendance. This highlighted to me just how fast the UK battery research community is progressing.
“It has been wonderful being part of the community that the Faraday Institution has created, and it is invaluable to connect with researchers answering similar questions who you may not otherwise meet.”
James is also a member of the Faraday Institution Early Career Researcher (ECR) committee that organised the ECR conference in the autumn of 2022 and is leading on planning and delivering the same event to be held in March 2024.
“When doing a PhD, it can be quite intimidating stepping up at your first conference and presenting your work. We wanted to create a more informal platform where people could feel encouraged and comfortable to present their findings. The ECR conference now also offers training and community-based activities and brings together the cohort of PhD researchers and post docs from across the country.”
What advice does James have for ECRs?
“Keep presenting your work, even if there is only one person in the room.”
Faraday Pathway written by Science Communications Intern Nancy Stitt and published February 2024.