Professor Charles Monroe

Professor of Engineering Science

Charles Monroe is Professor of Engineering Science in the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, and the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust Tutorial Fellow of Engineering at St Peter’s College Oxford. He is also a director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Circular Battery Economies.

Charles has a BSE in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked under Prof John Newman. He studied electrowetting as a research associate of Prof Alexei Kornyshev at Imperial College London, after which he was Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before moving to Oxford in 2015 as Associate Professor.

His research group focuses on the discovery, design, and characterization of next-generation energy storage and conversion systems. Charles has worked on both theoretical and experimental aspects of these problems. His interest centres primarily on understanding how materials interact to determine cell-level performance, often involving multiphysics and nonequilibrium thermodynamics. He won an NSF CAREER award in 2013 to support his study of redox flow batteries and led the EPSRC Materials Research Hub for Energy Capture, Conversion, and Storage from 2017-2021.

He was a founding investigator of the Faraday Institution, and has taken leadership roles in the solid-state batteries (SOLBAT) and multi-scale modelling (MSM) projects since they started in 2018. He won the Faraday Institution Community Award in 2023 for being a co-founder of the annual Oxford Battery Modelling Symposium, which brings together top researchers in the field of battery simulation, control, and design. Charles has worked closely with industry partners, including Agratas, Bosch, DENSO, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Procter & Gamble, and Siemens, among others.