Ted first got involved in alternative energy research at UCLA, where he worked on battery materials. This continued with his Master’s degree, where he worked on a thesis project at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s electrochemistry group on a relatively unknown battery system that uses lithium and sulfur. After writing his thesis and a highly cited paper, he went on to work for a battery manufacturing company. He returned to CSULB to obtain a degree in chemical engineering. After a few more years in the industry, he decided to return to school for a PhD at Caltech with Bill Goddard, focusing on computational modeling of materials. During his time at Caltech, he published ten papers on batteries and fuel cells. His papers focused on atomic level simulations, developing ways to improve electrochemical systems. After Caltech, he worked for a few years at UCLA as a postdoc, focusing on computational simulations of solar cells at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM).