She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and an inaugural academician of the Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences.

Her research targets the global challenge of grid-scale large-scale energy storage. While lithium-ion batteries dominate consumer electronics and new-energy vehicles, they face significant limitations in grid applications: frequent safety incidents and high construction costs deter utility operators. Lu Yijun believes that to simultaneously address safety and cost issues, electrolytes must be redesigned at the molecular level. Since 2014, her team has been dedicated to developing high-safety, low-cost aqueous energy storage technologies. CUHK’s comprehensive experimental facilities and mature innovation incubation mechanisms have provided fertile ground for technology transfer. In 2020, Luquos Energy was officially established with the goal of transforming laboratory flow battery technology into practical energy storage products.

Commercialization of sulfur-based flow batteries has long been hindered by two major industry challenges: the "sulfur shuttle" effect caused by polysulfide crossover through membranes, leading to rapid capacity degradation; and sluggish reaction kinetics in sulfur systems, limiting power performance. Lu Yijun’s team developed an integrated suite of original technologies—crowded-molecule electrolyte, CRIS charge-enhanced ion-selective membrane, and biomimetic molecular catalysts—that systematically improve the efficiency, stability, and cycle life of sulfur-based flow batteries across electrolyte, separator, and catalytic dimensions. These breakthroughs have been published in top international journals such as *Nature Energy* and *Nature Materials*.

At its core, this flow battery technology is inherently safe, utilizing non-flammable, non-explosive aqueous electrolytes that eliminate the risk of thermal runaway. Its key active material, sulfur, is abundant and inexpensive, avoiding reliance on volatile metals like lithium or vanadium and containing no heavy metals. According to corporate projections, the system can achieve over 15 years of cycle life, and once scaled up, its cost could be halved compared to lithium batteries, with material costs only one-quarter of those of vanadium redox flow batteries. After more than a decade of development, the technology has evolved dramatically—from a 5-centimeter lab-scale prototype to large-scale, grid-connected energy storage systems capable of real-world deployment.