The Faraday Institution: An invitation to the scientists who will power our future

When Michael Faraday delivered his Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution, he did so with a particular audience in mind. He insisted on ‘the right of addressing myself to the younger members of the audience,’ promising to ‘return to second childhood and become, as it were, young again amongst the young.’

Born into poverty and largely self‑educated, Faraday knew from experience how dimly lit and narrow the pathway into science could be. His choice of a candle as the subject of his most famous series, The chemical history of a candle, was no accident. In his hands, an ordinary object became a way of meeting people where they are – using the familiar to invite them into the conversation of science.

It is no coincidence that the UK’s national institute for electrochemical energy storage carries Faraday’s name: his electrochemical laws still underpin how we think about charge, capacity and efficiency in modern battery systems, and his lectures modelled what it means to invite the next generation into a new field. That tradition continues in our partnership with the Royal Institution, where, since 2019, we have co‑curated a series of public events on the future of batteries and electrification.

Faraday’s world and our own are very different. In the early 19th century, electricity was a curiosity; today, electrochemical energy storage sits at the intersection of economic growth, energy security and climate stability. Batteries are no longer a marginal technology, they are a platform upon which the UK and many other nations are betting their industrial strategies and their net‑zero commitments.

For the students and early‑career scientists reading this, these are not abstract forces; they are the context in which your research will be asked to make a difference. What follows from this is a set of practical imperatives and, for the next generation, a set of invitations.

First, we must drive down the cost of batteries while improving their sustainability and circularity, so that storage deployed alongside renewables becomes the obvious economic choice, as well as the low‑carbon choice. Second, we must design and engineer systems that use these technologies to decarbonise and electrify transport, industry and stationary applications at a low enough cost that clean power need not remain a luxury of wealthy nations. It can instead become the infrastructure on which communities everywhere, including the energy‑poor towns and villages of emerging economies, build their own prosperity.

Those are big, structural challenges, but they are also exactly the kind of problems that can capture a young scientist’s imagination: tangible, measurable and urgent – challenges in need of people willing to adopt them as their working life’s mission.

That is the scale of the challenge the Faraday Institution set out to address. From day one, our model was ambitious and interdisciplinary: large, collaborative, multi‑institutional research programmes that bring together chemists, materials scientists, physicists, computational modellers, engineers, biologists and mathematicians. Today, our research spans ten core projects, drawing together a community of over 500 researchers across 25 UK universities. Industry sits alongside academia to frame the research questions and accelerate the journey from discovery to demonstration.

As the UK government’s modern industrial strategy and advanced manufacturing plan recognise, batteries now represent a frontier growth industry. That recognition brings with it a responsibility to think boldly about the next wave of challenges. At the Faraday Institution we have begun to do this through a set of transformational challenges: programme‑scale efforts that tackle questions where the science is still emerging, but the potential impact is profound. UltraStore is one of these, aimed at delivering ultra‑low cost, long‑duration energy storage for the grid – the kind of storage that can genuinely complement wind and solar. The questions we ask are not just ‘can this be done?’ but ‘who will we need to train over the coming decades to make this real?’

Collaborating for battery transformation: the next generation of researchers

A research programme is only as strong as the people who populate it. This brings me to what I believe is one of the most important investments the Faraday Institution has made to date, running as a quiet but powerful thread: building the next generation of researchers.

We launched the Faraday Undergraduate Summer Experience (Fuse) in our first year. We drew inspiration from the US Department of Energy’s science undergraduate laboratory internship programme, which has for decades embedded undergraduates in national laboratories, placing students under the mentorship of leading researchers and asking them to do real science.

The evidence behind this model is compelling. Studies of undergraduate research experiences show that they increase persistence in STEM careers, improve progression to postgraduate study and help close equity gaps for students from underrepresented backgrounds. Students who engage in meaningful research are more likely to complete their degrees on time, see themselves as scientists and pursue scientific careers.

What we understood, and what the evidence supports, is that the barrier into science for many talented young people is not ability – it is exposure and permission. Energy materials, electrochemistry and battery engineering are subjects that rarely feature prominently on undergraduate syllabuses. For most Fuse interns, the programme represents their first encounter with the battery sector and their first experience of genuinely independent research. We place them into research groups, working alongside scientists and we ask them to contribute. Our research community trains them to set up experiments, capture and analyse data, present results, and synthesise their findings into the next set of questions. We pair this with a cohort model: fortnightly webinars, guest speakers who have walked this path before, and a community that tells students, clearly and repeatedly, that they belong.

What we understood is that the barrier into science for many talented you people is not ability – it is exposure and permission.

Eight years in, the results are striking. Over 360 students have passed through Fuse. In 2025 alone, the programme received around 1,200 applications for 47 places – a demand that speaks to both the quality of the experience and the hunger among young people for something more than a traditional placement. More than eight in ten recent participants said they would consider a career in energy storage or battery technology. When we traced the trajectories of alumni from our first five cohorts, 41% had gone on to undertake PhDs – far in excess of national norms – and more than half of those doctorates were in battery science or renewable energy. Of those who moved into industry, nearly two‑thirds were working in STEM roles, compared to a national average of about a quarter for STEM graduates. A large majority of alumni remain based in the UK.

Visualising the future

Permission, mentorship and a sense of belonging are not soft considerations; they are the materials from which scientific communities are built. That is why the 2025 Public Attitudes to Science report, produced by Ipsos with the British Science Association and UK Research and Innovation, is both encouraging and sobering. Most UK adults value what scientists do, yet far fewer feel science improves their own prosperity, and some younger people say school actually put them off science.

The report’s idea of ‘science capital’ is crucial: the more that people encounter science in their lives, the more they trust it and want to engage with it. This requires meaningful contact with real science. The British Science Association is right to focus on transforming education, putting communities at the heart of research and building a sector that looks more like the society it serves. The distance between scientific research and everyday life can feel like a chasm, one that can only be closed by building bridges and connecting people.

Fuse has become a feeder for our PhD programme precisely because it set out to build those bridges. The PhD programme rests on the same philosophy: that scientific excellence requires far more than intellect. We aim to produce leaders of the future – people who can thrive in academic, policy or industrial careers, who understand the battery sector from atom to supply chain and who have the collaborative and communicative skills to translate their knowledge into societal benefit. Our PhD programme includes battery schools, industry tours, internships, opportunities for international experience and policy fellowships, and a mini-battery entrepreneurship MBA. Around a fifth of one recent PhD cohort were previously Fuse interns, and 92% of our first two cohorts of PhD graduates now work in the battery sector. The pipeline is working.

Faraday knew something important: that curiosity, given the right conditions, has the power to transform. Our task is to create those conditions – a laboratory, a supervisor, a question – and then to step back and let students make the work their own. What they give back – to science, to the sector and, in time, to society – is the real measure of our success. The scientists who will power our future will be the ones who follow that curiosity wherever it leads.

The Faraday Institution is the UK’s independent institute for electrochemical energy storage research, skills development, market analysis, and early-stage commercialisation. It is a delivery partner for the Battery Innovation Programme, funded by the Department for Business and Trade and delivered by Innovate UK.

Read more about the 2026 Fuse programme.