In honor of Arab American Heritage Month, researcher Dr. Maher El-Kady (Ph.D. ’13), a native of Egypt, is featured in a UCLA Newsroom article and a short UCLA College video celebrating members of the Arab community at UCLA.
In the UCLA Newsroom article, El-Kady is included in a curated selection of stories from across the UCLA campus spotlighting Arab American voices, histories and research.
In the UCLA College video, El-Kady discusses his research on next-generation batteries.
El-Kady, who received his Ph.D. in chemistry from UCLA in 2013 with Professor Richard Kaner, is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Nanotech Energy and an Assistant Researcher in the Kaner group at UCLA. Kaner, El-Kady, and physician-entrepreneur Dr. Jack Kavanaugh founded Nanotech Energy in 2014 with the goal of taking their cutting-edge research on graphene-based energy storage devices from the laboratory to the marketplace.
El-Kady was recently featured in a new short film from the Chemistry Shorts series titled Energy to Spare: Building Better Batteries. The seven-minute film highlights El-Kady’s work on next-generation battery technology, specifically zinc-ion batteries, as a safer and more sustainable alternative to lithium-ion batteries. In February, El-Kady was named by CIOLOOK Magazine as one of The 10 Most Influential Leaders in E-Mobility for 2025 and was featured in an in-depth article and on the cover of the January issue of the magazine.
In 2022, Chemical & Engineering News named El-Kady one of the Talented Twelve for that year. Last year, he was also one of only three young scientists in the field of energy storage honored with the prestigious Energy Storage Materials (EnSM) Young Scientist Award.
