Nanostructured materials play an important role in advancing the electrochemical energy storage and conversion technologies such as lithium ion batteries and fuel cells, offering great promise to address the rapidly growing environmental concerns and the increasing global demand for energy. In this review, we summarize some of the recent progress and advances in our laboratory on nanostructured electrode materials for lithium ion batteries and platinum-based and platinum-free nanoalloy electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC). Materials design, novel chemical synthesis and processing, advanced materials characterization, and electrochemical evaluation data are presented.
