Univ.-Prof. Dr. Daniel Rettenwander

Institute of Chemical Technologies and Analytics, Research Division Technical Electrochemistry

Habilitated for: Solid-State Chemistry

Homepage (NTNU): https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/daniel.rettenwander, opens an external URL in a new window

Daniel Rettenwander received his master’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Graz and earned his PhD in Materials Science from the University of Salzburg in 2014. He subsequently held a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the group of Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang (2016–2017). From 2017 to 2021, he led a junior research group at Graz University of Technology, where he also completed his habilitation in solid-state chemistry in 2020. In 2021, he joined the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) as an Associate Professor and was promoted to Full Professor in 2023. Since 2025, he has also served as a Principal Scientist at the Austrian Institute of Technology.

His research focuses on batteries for automotive and grid-storage applications, battery recycling, and the direct extraction of lithium and rare-earth elements from sources such as brines. This work spans the development of novel materials and scaling approaches for solid-state batteries to the design of specialized instrumentation for operando diffraction and spectroscopy, using both custom-built, in-house setups and large-scale user facilities (e.g., ESRF, DESY, SOLARIS).