Carbon nanomaterials are of outmost importance in the age of electrochemical energy conversion and storage. They are essential components for the electrode design in various electrochemical energy technologies, be it as support, additive or storage materials. As most of these technologies employ powder processing in the manufacturing of electrodes, control over individual particle properties (intraparticle properties) as well as particle ensembles (interparticle properties) is of outmost importance in terms of electrode design. In here, the synthesis, characterization, and application of tailored 3D porous carbon nanospheres will be presented. Tailoring of performance determining parameters such as pore size, surface area, graphitization, composition etc. will be demonstrated and applications of these materials and derived electrodes in electrocatalyst design for electrolysis and fuel cell applications as well as supercapacitors and battery technologies will be demonstrated.

Anna Fischer’s research focuses on the design of porous and nanostructured materials for electrochemical energy conversion and storage. She studied Chemistry and Materials Chemistry at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris (2000 – 2005), before moving to Germany for her PhD (2005 – 2008) at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces - Department of Colloid Chemistry and the University of Potsdam and her Postdoc (2008 – 2009) at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces - Department of Biomaterials. In 2010 she established her independent research group on porous electrodes for (bio)electrocatalysis at the TU Berlin. In August 2014 Anna Fischer got appointed as a W3 professor for Inorganic Functional Materials and Nanomaterials at the University of Freiburg. Anna Fischer is currently member of the board of directors of the Freiburg Material Research Center (FMF) and the Freiburg Center for Interactive Materials and Bioinspired Technologies (FIT), vide dean of the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy and one of the three spokespersons of the DFG Excellence Cluster livMatS “Living, adaptive and energy-autonomous material systems.” Her research interests lie in the synthesis, in-depth characterization, and application of porous and nanostructured materials for electrochemical energy systems, ranging from carbon materials and electrocatalysts for fuel cells and electrolyzers to storage materials for supercapacitors and (photo)batteries.