Jungwoo Lee is a materials scientist and UC San Diego nanoengineering graduate student working to make better batteries in the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Converstion run by NanoEngineering professor Shirley Meng at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Lee is also a key member of a UC San Diego battery startup called South 8 Technologies. The team is commercializing breakthrough research led by Cyrus Rustomji (UC San Diego PhD ‘15) in Shirley Meng’s lab. The researchers’ advances in electrolyte chemistry enable lithium-ion batteries to run at temperatures as low as -60 degrees Celsius with excellent performance. For comparison, today’s lithium-ion batteries stop working at -20 degrees Celsius. The South 8 Technologies team aims to leverage their work to provide unique battery solutions for a variety of transportation, high-atmosphere, aerospace and defense applications.