People

Staff Member
Keith.J.Billings@jpl.nasa.gov


Experience
Keith Billings is a materials and process engineer in JPL’s Electrochemical Research, Technology, & Engineering Team. He began his career at JPL in 2007 as an academic part-time employee, focused on high performance PEM fuel cell development for NASA under the mentorship of Dr. Thomas Valdez. He has since expanded his focus to include the development of a number of power and energy storage technologies including lithium batteries, extreme temperature supercapacitors, solid state electrolytes, and regenerative fuel cells, as well as flight hardware testing. Keith holds B.S and M.S. degrees in chemical engineering from California State Polytechnic University Pomona (2008) and the University of Southern California (2012), respectively. An engineer surrounded by chemists, Keith’s work has frequently involved establishing technological proof of concept from basic principles.

Engineering Development Technician
francisco.j.guillen@jpl.nasa.gov

Experience
Francisco Guillen is an Engineering Development Technician with the Electrochemical Technologies Team at JPL. He has over 20 years working experience in high tech start-ups that specialized in advanced transportation, lithium batteries, and catalysts technologies. He has worked as Facilities Technician in a start-up, co-founded by Caltech’s Dr. Richard Yazami, and the Facilities/Technology Specialist at a start-up co-founded by Caltech’s Dr. Robert H. Grubbs, which developed and sells Grubbs catalysts through Sigma-Aldrich. His main focus is to support a safely run facility and ensure compliance will all regulations, policies, and procedures. His primary duties are to maintain equipment in both battery testing and wet chemistry laboratories.

Staff Member
John-Paul.Jones@jpl.nasa.gov

Experience
Dr. John-Paul Jones is currently a technologist at JPL working in the Electrochemical Research, Technology, & Engineering Team with research projects in lithium-ion batteries, primary lithium batteries, atomic layer deposition techniques, molten salt batteries, solid oxide fuel cells, electrochemical oxygen production, and astrobiology. He is primarily engaged in fundamental research to develop new battery chemistry and understand it, with an overall focus is on energy storage and conversion for space systems. After receiving his B.S. in chemistry from UC Berkeley in 2007, he worked on synthetic biofuels at Amyris Biotechnologies in Emeryville, California. He then went on to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Southern California in 2015 where he received the William P. Weber award for Outstanding Graduate Research in 2014 for research in synthetic fluorine chemistry, computational chemistry, and electrochemistry.

Engineering Development Technician
Jasmina.Pasalic@jpl.nasa.gov

Experience
Jasmina Pasalic is an Engineering Development Technician in JPL’s Electrochemcial Technologies Team. She supports the team’s goals of researching advanced storage energy technologies by performing a wide range of laboratory tasks such as materials testing, optimizing electrode fabrication, fabricating and testing batteries, carrying out failure analysis, and performing lab organization for efficient operations.
Jasmina has over 20 years of experience in the field of research and technology development. Prior to joining JPL, she worked as a Research Technician for Nanostream, which developed and manufactured capital equipment that speed drug discovery and development. In this role, she performed a variety of technical activities including manufacturing of microfluidic devices, quality control data analysis, biochemical sample preparation and high-performance liquid chromatography. Jasmina has also worked at Superprotonic, a fuel cell/energy technology company established to market and commercialize an innovative solid acid fuel cell technology developed and patented by the company's founders at the California Institute of Technology. She worked with a team that had scaled up technology from a pile of nickel-sized cells with a lifetime of less than 100 hours to a stack of five-inch plates that could produce 50 Watts of power for nearly 1,000 hours. She also worked at Contour Energy Systems, a startup with collaboration of Caltech and CNRS, the French National Center of Scientific Research. The company was pioneering breakthrough advancements in new fluorine-based battery chemistries, nano-materials science and manufacturing processes.

Staff Member
hui.li.seong@jpl.nasa.gov

Experience
Hui Li Seong is a Technologist in the JPL Electrochemical Research, Technology, & Engineering Team. She is supporting the development of high specific energy primary batteries for Europa Lander and future Ocean Worlds missions.
Hui Li received her BS in Biotechnology and Chemistry from California Polytechnic Univ. Pomona in 2008. Her passion for environmental conservation ultimately led to her career in alternative energy solutions.
Hui Li received most of her battery electrochemical education on the job after receiving her BS. She began her battery career as a Process Development Engineer for primary batteries in a start-up company co-founded by Caltech's Dr. Rachid Yazami. Hui Li then moved on to Silicon Valley giant, Apple Inc. and continued to expand her expertise into battery testing, material characterization and electrochemical characterization of Li-ion batteries. After Apple, Hui Li returned to Southern California, where she worked in Quallion as a Battery Engineer supporting aerospace and medical programs, as well as supervising the Test Team.
Batteries and battery materials continue to fascinate Hui Li today. She seeks to further understand battery performance and the degradation mechanisms associated with it via material and electrochemical characterization, with the goal of improving overall battery performance.

Principal Member Technical Staff
Marshall.C.Smart@jpl.nasa.gov

Experience
Dr. Marshall C. Smart is currently a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, in the Electrochemical Research, Technology, & Engineering Team, where he has worked since 1994. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1998 with a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry, focusing on the chemical and electrochemical oxidation of small organic molecules, and the development of polymer electrolyte membranes for direct oxidation fuel cells. While at JPL, Dr. Smart has supported a number of JPL projects focused on the exploration of Mars and the Outer Planets, including the 2001 Mars Surveyor Program, the Solar Probe/Outer Planets Program, the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover (MER), the 2011 Mars Science Laboratory, and the Mars InSight Project. In addition to validating lithium battery technologies for aerospace flight missions, a major focus of his research has been in the development of electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries to improve their performance over a wide operating temperature range, especially at low temperatures.