Alex Urban is an Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering and one of the core members of the recently founded Columbia Electrochemical Energy Center (CEEC). His group investigates materials for electrochemical energy storage and conversion using a combination of atomic-scale modeling and data science techniques. Alex obtained his PhD from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and did postdoctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to Columbia, he was an independent research fellow in the School of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews, UK.