Thor Balkhed
The Foundation of His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf鈥檚 50th Anniversary Fund for Science, Technology and the Environment supports young researchers who contribute to sustainable development through groundbreaking research in natural sciences, technology, and environmental science.
In 2026, three of the scholarships went to Xiane Li at the Department of Technology and Natural Sciences, and to Durga Sankar Vavilapalli and Joel Davidsson, both at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.
Thor Balkhed
Xiane Li conducts research on artificial photosynthesis, a field aimed at converting solar energy into fuels and chemicals in a sustainable way. The project develops advanced measurement methods that allow researchers to observe what happens in a material while it is actually in use, rather than only in a conventional laboratory sample, focusing on chemical reactions and charge transfer at interfaces between solids and liquids.
The goal is to understand how photo- and electrocatalytic systems function under realistic operating conditions 鈥� knowledge that is crucial for developing future sustainable energy technologies.
鈥淭he scholarship will support this work and contribute to the development of new experimental tools for understanding sustainable photo- and electrocatalytic processes.鈥�
鈥淚n the future, I plan to continue my research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, where I am developing operando techniques based on AP-XPS, Nano-IR, and other advanced synchrotron methods to study catalytic systems and artificial photosynthesis. Since I started at the Advanced Light Source as a visiting postdoctoral researcher in October last year, I have had the opportunity to learn a great deal about these techniques and their applications.
