One major focus of energy storage research in the Tolbert group is on the development of pseudocapacitors, which are materials that show redox reactions similar to traditional batteries, but at significantly faster rates. For these materials, controlled nanoscale architecture can reduce the diffusion lengths of lithium ions and fundamentally change the nature of the lithium ion insertion process through suppression of kinetically slow phase transitions. Current efforts in this area are focused on synthesizing new pseudocapacitive materials through polymer templating of porous architectures and on using advanced characterization techniques, such as synchrotron-based operando X-ray diffraction, to understand the relationship between material structure and rate capability.