Michael Borrello

Email: michael.borrello@berkeley.edu

5th Year PhD Candidate
4116 Etcheverry Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720

BIO
Michael is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the SALT Research Group. He received his Bachelors in Chemical Engineering from the City College of New York. Michael previously studied the thermal hydraulics of VHTR’s as an undergraduate research assistant. He now focuses on the development of electrochemical sensors to study redox chemistry, thermodynamics, and engineering operations in molten salt environments for advanced reactors.

PROJECTS
Michael began his work with the SALT Research Group designing a Natural Circulation Molten Salt Corrosion Loop, a project sponsored by ThorCon Power, and continues this work today by training students for scaling up molten salt operations. Michael also works on designing and characterizing a thermodynamic reference electrode (TRE) for FLiBe thanks to funding from Ultramet based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Energy, under Award Number DE-SC0021952. He has worked on the NEUP Molten Salt Pump Development project, a collaboration between the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oak Ridge National Lab, Kairos Power, and Powdermet. Most recently, Michael has been working on the design and implementation of an electrochemical probe for monitoring redox potential, corrosion product concentration, and detecting tritium in an irradiated salt loop as a part of the NEUP IRP Molten Salt Reactor Test Bed with Neutron Irradiation, a project led by MIT and with collaborations between North Carolina State University and Oak Ridge National Lab. Michael pursues projects that concern the development of instrumentation for advanced reactors in hopes of seeing these reactors provide clean energy to the world.

PRESENTATIONS
2024 ECS 245th Conference Presentation – DOI: 10.1149/MA2024-02573788mtgabs
2023 ACS Fall Conference Presentation – Link to abstract
2022 ECS 242nd Conference Poster – DOI: 10.1149/MA2024-02573788mtgabs
2022 ECS 242nd Conference Presentation – DOI: 10.1149/MA2022-0212765mtgabs
2022 ANS Summer Conference Presentation – DOI: 10.13182/T126-38327

UPCOMING TALKS
TBA

AWARDS
2026 UCB Outstanding GSI Award
2022 UCB NE Virgil E. Schrock Award
2021 NEST-SMART SMR Fellow
2021 NSF GRFP Honorary Mention
2020 NRC Student Scholarship

PUBLICATIONS
Publications can be found following the link to my ORCID.
ORCID Profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0285-542X