#SoCaltech: Karthish Manthiram

“When I was 5 or 6, I started to scavenge wires and light bulbs and electrical parts, and would be found on the floor of my bedroom starting to build circuits and putting stuff together. I just loved electricity. I thought it was the coolest thing. And honestly, it stayed with me; it's something that's very core to me. But it was built out of this empirical way of doing things, just finding parts, assembling them, seeing what would happen—even burning up a lot of stuff by mistake. This very early childhood period of just kind of playing around and tinkering has now become a much bigger part of my life.

Chemistry came much later. It was never natural for me. I think electrons and the way that they move through wires, to me, was always easy. With molecules, I knew that there was something interesting and important there. But the combination of what electrons do and what molecules do came much later. At the end of my undergraduate research and in graduate school, I started to see how those worlds came together. And that, in turn, has really become the vision of our lab: to understand how you use electrons to make and break chemical bonds.”

—Karthish Manthiram is a professor of chemical engineering and chemistry and a William H. Hurt Scholar. You can now watch his April 19, 2023, Watson Lecture, “Electrifying and Decarbonizing Chemical Synthesis” online. To view other Watson Lectures, visit Caltech’s YouTube channel.

#SoCaltech is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to magazine@caltech.edu.