UVA Engineer Geoff Geise Wins NAMS Permeance Prize for Mid-Career Excellence

Flow batteries are gaining attention as a practical route to storing renewable electricity, addressing a central barrier to the clean-energy transition: the absence of large-scale, durable energy-storage systems. Among the most promising designs are non-aqueous redox flow batteries, which rely on electrically charged ions dispersed in organic, solvent-based liquids.

In these devices, the battery’s membrane must be selective and long-lived. It needs to allow target ions to move between compartments, while blocking other species from crossing and degrading performance. Achieving both high conductivity and low permeability over years is a persistent materials challenge.

Geoffrey M. Geise, an associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Virginia, co-leads a research effort aimed at patenting one of the early membrane designs engineered for long service life. The approach targets a core performance trade-off in ion transport: improving ion conduction often risks increasing unintended passage of other components.

Geise’s work earned him the 2026 Permeance Prize for Mid-Career Excellence from the North American Membrane Society (NAMS). In his view, the recognition reflects years of collaborative progress within membrane science and technology.

Technically, the lab’s membranes function like selective filters. They separate minerals, ions, or drug-relevant molecules by leveraging differences in size, charge, and transport behavior across polymer layers. To do this reliably, researchers must understand how chemical interactions and mechanical stability shape ion pathways through polymer structures.

A key part of Geise’s impact stems from elucidating how polymer chemistry influences transport. Earlier work helped articulate a trade-off relevant to desalination: increasing salt selectivity can reduce water permeability. That insight has informed membrane design strategies for purification systems.

More recently, the group has advanced molecular-level understanding of ion–polymer interactions using dielectric relaxation spectroscopy. By probing how charges and molecules behave inside materials, the technique provides data that supports modeling of candidate membranes—an advantage when more conventional methods fail.

Geise also extends membrane expertise beyond energy storage, including work on extracting lithium from salt brines, a resource critical for batteries but dominated by foreign supply chains. Mentors and colleagues highlight that his research philosophy centers on enabling other engineers—especially students—to develop scalable technologies grounded in fundamental transport science.

The Permeance Prize will be presented at ICOM 2026, the International Congress on Membranes and Membrane Processes, hosted by NAMS in July.

Keywords

membranes; ion transport; dielectric relaxation spectroscopy; polymer selectivity; redox flow batteries; non-aqueous electrolytes; desalination; permeability–conductivity trade-off; scalable energy storage