Dr. Baris Key has been mainly involved in fundamental characterization, guided synthesis and battery chemistry development in energy storage field since 2006. He developed practical in situ NMR methodologies to aid in the fundamental understanding and characterization of high-energy anode chemistries for lithium ion batteries: Combined experimental study of local structure probes, NMR and X-Ray PDF, to discover lithiation and delithiation mechanism of silicon anodes with related high impact papers constituting the widely accepted mechanism. The in situ NMR techniques he and Prof. Clare Grey developed also enabled fully quantitative analysis of metallic lithium microstructures, allowing the field to improve aspects of lithium-ion battery safety. He contributed to solid electrolyte synthesis and characterization field in his first year of postdoctoral fellowship at ANL. During his postdoctoral studies he initiated and led a project, under the ​“Voltage Fade” DOE Deep Dive program, to develop an understanding of lithium rich cathode material chemistry and a quantitative NMR methodology, via isotopic enrichment, to study structural and electrochemical degradation of one of the most promising high-energy cathode materials. With the inception of the DOE Energy Innovation Hub, JCESR in 2012, he became a permanent staff at ANL in 2014 and started work in beyond lithium-ion batteries. He then adapted ²⁵Mg NMR methodologies, a very challenging nucleus to work with, to magnesium-ion battery cathode materials for the first time in order to aid in the fundamental understanding of multivalent-ion battery chemistries. More recently, he and Dr. Jack Vaughey invented an approach to utilize multivalent (M) salts in lithium-ion electrolytes to stabilize silicon anodes via in situ formation of ternary Li-M-Si Zintl phases to enable long term cycling of high energy density silicon anodes.