Professor Ma Ruguang from Suzhou University of Science and Technology was invited to deliver an academic lecture at the Provincial Key Laboratory of Island Green Energy and New Materials on the afternoon of April 1. The event, chaired by Professor Wang Jiacheng, Director of the laboratory, attracted faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduates for knowledge exchange.
Professor Ma, who has long specialized in the preparation processes and structure-property relationships of biomass-derived functional carbon materials, focused his lecture on the design strategies and sustainable energy applications of various biomass-derived carbon materials. He detailed his team’s latest breakthroughs in “property regulation of biomass-based porous carbon,” particularly in controlling microstructures, defect concentrations, charge migration pathways, and their correlations with device performance.
Lecture highlights
Ma emphasized that the rapid development of new energy technologies has created significant opportunities for biomass-derived carbon materials. These materials, he noted, are in high demand for applications ranging from mainstream lithium-ion batteries to future high-energy-density lithium/sodium-sulfur batteries. Against this backdrop, his team proposed an innovative strategy: using mangosteen peel as a raw material, they developed functional micro-mesoporous carbon through multi-stage temperature heating and insulation, leveraging the physical confinement effects of micro-mesopores. When applied to room-temperature sodium-sulfur battery electrodes, the material demonstrated excellent rate performance and stability. Furthermore, by incorporating transition metals to create metal-nitrogen-carbon catalytic sites, the team enhanced sulfur conversion efficiency in room-temperature zinc-sulfur batteries and mitigated capacity decay in high-sulfur-content cathodes.
Professor Wang Jiacheng expressed sincere gratitude to Professor Ma for his insightful presentation. Attendees engaged in in-depth discussions with the expert on topics of interest.
Expert Profile:
Ma Ruguang, male, is a professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Suzhou University of Science and Technology. He obtained his Ph.D. from City University of Hong Kong in 2013. His research focuses on electrochemical energy storage and conversion materials, including battery electrode materials, separators, and electrocatalysts. To date, he has published over 140 SCI-indexed papers, including 67 as first or corresponding author in prestigious journals such as Angewandte Chemie International Edition (3 papers), Nature Communications, Progress in Materials Science, and Advanced Energy Materials. Six of his papers are recognized as ESI Highly Cited Papers, with an H-index of 55 and over 9,000 citations. He has contributed chapters to the English books Flexible Electronics and Battery Materials: Fundamentals and Applications.
Consistently ranked among the “World’s Top 2% Scientists” (2020-2024), Professor Ma has led two National Natural Science Foundation projects and four provincial-level research initiatives. He serves as a youth editorial board member for journals including Advanced Powder Materials, Frontiers of Physics, Materials Report: Energy, and Journal of Inorganic Materials, and is a committee member of the Jiangsu Provincial Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutrality Metrology Technology Committee.
