Dillip’s paper, with contributions from Tanmay Mohan Bhagwat of the group, on utilising defective zinc cobaltite (ZCO) as a bifunctional oxygen electrocatalyst, was published today in ACS Applied Energy Materials. The study demonstrates that ZCO can exhibit better electrocatalytic activity toward both oxygen reduction reaction and oxygen evolution reaction compared to prevalant standard, namely, Pt/C and IrO₂. We correlated the better performance of ZCO to the changes in the electronic structure induced by defect formation, as calculated using density functional theory. The work was led by Prof. Aninda Jiban Bhattacharyya of the Solid State Chemistry Unit, Indian Institute of Science, in collaboration with Prof. Sai Gautam Gopalakrishnan.