Ph.D. Student | Nuclear, Plasma, & Radiological Engineering
About
Although my formal academic training is in nuclear & plasma engineering, my research is more akin to chemical engineering. As such, I I consider reaction engineering to be my broad specialty: understanding and designing systems that achieve desired reactions between microscopic particles including chemical reactions (e.g. electrochemistry, thermochemistry, radical chemistry), electronic reactions (e.g. ionization, electron-ion recombination), and nuclear reactions (e.g. fusion, fission). Currently, I focus on what may be called high-temperature electrochemical reaction engineering through plasma-liquid electrochemistry and molten salt electrochemistry with an emphasis on mass transport coupled to chemical kinetics.
I am broadly motivated by problems that cross paths between energy, defense, natural resources, and sustainability. My perspective is this: as our current energy fossil carbon resources (e.g. oil, natural gas, coal) are transitioned towards others including biomass, hydrogen, lithium, cobalt, and uranium due to necessity by fossil carbon depletion and due to desire by climate change concerns, there will be increasing tensions between countries for access to the remaining fossil carbon resources (e.g. natural gas to Europe) and to the required transition-enabling minerals (e.g. cobalt from the Congo). Reaction engineers are required to develop technologies to develop more efficient and more flexible processes that use less materials, less energy, and a more diverse set of feedstocks to reduce resource-based geopolitical tensions, maintain peace, and promote prosperity.
Roles
- Graduate Research Assistant @ SPEC Lab (Prof. R. Mohan Sankaran) and @ ABC Lab (Prof. Lorenzo Vergari).
- Ph.D. Student @ Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering @ University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
- Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Stewardship Science Graduate Fellow (SSGF). Fellow profile: https://www.krellinst.org/ssgf/profile/peyres2024
Education
- 2023 | B.S. Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Journal Publications
- A. Jayanarasimhan, R. Pierrard, S. M. Peyres, S. Yatom, D. Curreli, and R. M. Sankaran. Insights into Sustainable Nitrogen Fixation by Gas-phase Spectroscopic Measurements and Global Modeling of Reaction Intermediates in Humid Nitrogen Plasma. ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering 13(1), 140-150 (2025)
- S. M. Peyres, J. Wang, D. W. Hollyfield, N. H. Abuyazid, R. M. Sankaran and N. B. Uner. Application of a Film Model to Mass Transfer and Chemical Reaction at a Plasma-Liquid Interface. Journal of The Electrochemical Society 171, 113502 (2024)
- N. H. Abuyazid, N. B. Uner, S. M. Peyres, and R. M. Sankaran. Charge decay in the spatial afterglow of plasmas and its impact on diffusion regimes. Nature Communications 14, 6776 (2023)