August 8, 2025: David Rosewater, a research engineer at Sandia National Laboratories, has been inducted into Battcon’s Hall of Fame.
A surprised Rosewater was called to the stage to receive the accolade by Ashton Curtis, part of the technical committee of the Battcon conference in Florida earlier this week.
Curtis said: “This year’s recipient is relatively young and relatively unknown.”
However, he said over the last five, six years, Rosewater had single-handedly, along with input from a couple of other people, “advanced the state of the battery safety industry by leaps and bounds with benefits to us all”.
Rosewater said: “Many of the folks who are past recipients of this award have been my mentors and to be counted among their number is a deep honour. These are folks who have lifted all of us up. And I feel unworthy to be counted among these people.”
Rosewater’s story began after taking his bachelor’s and master’s in electrical engineering at the University of Montana.
One of his professors had a friend at Sandia National Laboratories who suggested Rosewater apply for a research position and he joined in 2011.
Rosewater was mentored by former Battcon recipient Garth Corey, who suggested he submit a paper at Battcon, which he first did in 2013. The subject was zinc bromine flow batteries.
Rosewater left Sandia to do his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 2016 before returning to the national lab in 2020.
During that period, he became aware that there was little agreement on what constituted an industry-wide safety policy. He ended up creating a battery safety training class.
Rosewater told Battery International’s Battcon conference edition of Battery Street Journal. “I realized that there was a disconnect between what the people who do their work every day are doing and what the standard for electrical safety says they should be doing.”
That started a long process that culminated in the National Fire Protection Agency adopting his results — a huge safety benefit for the entire industry — and Rosewater hopes they will become a permanent part of the standards.
