Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Dr. Mario Pinto, President of NSERC.

I’m at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and I’m joined by Dr. Jeff Dahn, this year’s winner of Canada’s top research prize, the NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal. Congratulations, Jeff. This is a well-deserved honour. Through your work, you’ve played a major role in bringing lithium-ion batteries to the masses. What is it about these batteries that has captivated your attention and imagination for so long?

So it’s a multidisciplinary problem: you need chemistry, physics, engineering, materials science. So there’s always something new to work on. Lithium-ion cells at the beginning might have lasted one or two years, and now lithium-ion batteries that are implanted into humans to power medical devices need to last more than 10 years. So there’s been a lot of improvements, and that’s really enabled products like the electric vehicle, for example.

Could you comment on the long game in scientific research?

It takes a long time to acquire the infrastructure and the knowledge to operate at the state of the art in any field. NSERC has supported me extremely well throughout my career, and I’ve had two successive NSERC Industrial Research Chairs, one with 3M for 20 years and now one with Tesla. Tesla needed to establish either manufacturing or research facilities in Canada, and they’ve established an R&D centre in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, about 15 minutes from here. For me, it’s really wonderful and, I think, important for Nova Scotia that we have this centre of excellence for Tesla’s long-term battery development here. And we’re making good headway already.

Well, you’ve been referred to recently as Tesla’s secret weapon. What sort of impact do you hope to have on the future of electric vehicles?

We have really three main goals in our research program with Tesla. And these are, first, to help lower the cost of lithium-ion batteries; second, to increase their lifetime from 10 years to 20 years and so on; and third, to increase their energy density so that fewer cells will be required per vehicle.

Could you comment more broadly on energy generation and storage for a sustainable future?

I think it’s imperative that we move to renewable energy as our primary energy source. And solar technology and wind technology are there, but the storage component is not there. To store electrical energy at scale, I think, is probably one of the top two or three problems facing humanity at this time. So the next generation of researchers and current researchers really have to step up to the plate and work on this problem.

What have been some of your proudest moments?

I think my proudest moments are when graduate students and postdocs leave the group and go on to do really fascinating things on their own. It’s almost like your own children. When your own children succeed, you feel really proud.

There’s nothing like investment in the next generation, is there?

It’s really wonderful.

Jeff, thank you for taking the time to tell us a bit about your career, and congratulations on being named recipient of the NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal. We are proud of your many accomplishments and to count you as one of the family.

Thank you very much, Mario. It’s a real honour.