For Luisa Whittaker-Brooks, the quest to make the materials of the future started with understanding the shortcomings of the past.

Her team at the University of Utah is exploring a variety of materials to bolster electronic devices, including solar cells and batteries. And the idea isn't just to make these technologies work better but also to make them do more by bringing optimized, advanced materials together in next-gen, multitasking products.

Whittaker-Brooks grew up in Panama, where most of the power comes from hydroelectric dams. This reliance becomes more dangerous as the impacts of climate change become more severe, she says.

"In Panama, basically our rivers are drying up," she says. "And that made me think about how I can use other types of alternative energies."

One approach would be to control the crystal structure of perovskite solar-cell materials to deliver optimal energy-harvesting properties. But Whittaker-Brooks is not restricting her synthesize-and-optimize scheme to one material. Perovskites are just one piece of her puzzle.

To distinguish herself from others in the crowded solar-cell field and to build next-generation devices, she's engineering a variety of functional materials to one day work together in multifunctional devices.

For instance, her team is investigating the energy-storing behavior of two-dimensional metal chalcogenides, such as titanium sulfide, that could be incorporated into a power source to collect energy harvested from a perovskite solar cell. Such a device could continue delivering power even when the sun's down.

Whittaker-Brooks's group is also developing materials that generate electrical energy from heat, potentially providing another power source that works in the dark. Ultimately, the team's goal is to bring all these materials together in a single device to deliver uninterrupted, sustainable energy.

The team's materials would also be useful in a number of other devices, Whittaker-Brooks explains, including cell phones, sensors, and even hard drives. In pursuing these diverse applications, she is working to understand the fundamental materials science that she hopes will enable her and others to eventually engineer materials on demand, with specific properties for specific applications.

That's a tall order, but Whittaker-Brooks has always been a positive, tenacious force in the lab, thriving on challenges, says organic electronics expert Lynn Loo, Whittaker-Brooks's postdoc adviser at Princeton University. These traits have helped Whittaker-Brooks establish herself as a leader in materials synthesis, characterization, and device fabrication.

"The word 'relentless' comes to mind," Loo says. "She's a ball of fire."