Electrochemical Engineering

Esther Sans Takeuchi was born on September 8, 1953 in Kansas City. She is the daughter of Latvian immigrants, who, after the Soviet Union occupied Latvia following World War II, fled to a refugee camp in Germany. Her parents stayed in Europe for six more years, moving to the United States in 1951. When she started school in Ohio, Esther spoke the Latvian she was familiar with from home and barely any English. Her father was an electrical engineer. Esther graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with bachelor's degrees in both chemistry and history. Subsequently, she earned her Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Ohio State University. Dr. Takeuchi learned electrochemistry during two postdoctoral positions, the first at the University of North Carolina with Royce Murray and then with Professor Janet Osteryoung at SUNY Buffalo. For most of her career Esther worked at Greatbatch, Inc., a medical device company founded by the inventor of the implantable pacemaker. Providing power to these implantable devices is a difficult challenge. Esther's first project at Greatbatch was working on the implantable cardiac defibrillator, which is used to treat irregular heartbeats. The battery for the defibrillator is required to provide short pulses of high power in addition to lasting up to 10 years. Today hundreds of thousands of these devices are implanted annually. Over the years, Esther ...