When it comes to recognizing opportunities and making a difference in his industry, Dr. Chris Burns, a 2009 StFX physics graduate, has more than a few accomplishments by his name.
In 2013, a graduate student at the time, he co-founded a company called NOVONIX after seeing huge potential in the research of accelerating long-lasting, high-performing batteries. Over the past 12 years, NOVONIX has become a leading battery technology business revolutionizing the global lithium-ion battery industry with sustainable technologies, high-performance materials, and more efficient production methods.
At its peak, his company was valued at $3 billion.
More recently, he led NOVONIX in establishing a North American synthetic graphite battery supply chain—something that hadn’t existed before.
“We’ve built, over the past seven years, the leading battery material company that is homegrown here in North America,” says Dr. Burns who served as NOVONIX CEO until January 2025 when he stepped back to become strategic advisor to the board.
It’s a story that has an interesting genesis.
Dr. Burns grew up outside Boston, the son of two engineers. He originally attended Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where he studied engineering physics, but transferred to StFX (where his now wife Katie Smith ’09 was a student) to complete his final two years in the StFX Physics Department.
StFX, he says, provided a breadth of experience in both experimental and theoretical physics, while the size of the university allowed for an environment where students had access to their professors as well a community of their peers and graduate students.
Especially pivotal were high caliber faculty researchers at StFX, a small university, who were working with some of the world’s biggest, most interesting projects in the physics space.
“The professors have international ties. That’s what opens the doors for the students,” Dr. Burns says.
“It makes all the difference. They have an open door policy. They’re accessible. They care about the students, and they are able to be invested in the students and give attention to their projects.”
During Dr. Burns’ time at StFX, it was also an exciting time in the field of physics with the advent of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, and work that would lead to the discovery of the Higgs boson particle.
Following his StFX graduation, Dr. Burns spent some time in fundamental physics before opting to take a more applied, industry-impactful route. He began a master’s degree at Dalhousie University under the supervision of Dr. Jeff Dahn, one of the top researchers globally in fuel cells and batteries.
“Batteries were getting good enough to power electric cars,” Dr. Burns recalled. “We wanted to see if we made changes to the chemistry, how long it would take us to know if it was a good change or bad change.”
To determine if the changes were prolonging or shortening battery life, they developed testing equipment to measure how quickly the batteries degraded. With the new technology, answers were coming in as little as three weeks, a far cry from traditional testing methods, which could take six to 12 months or more. Dr. Burns says the lab started doing a lot of work around changing materials and testing them both through the traditional manner and their new technology. Both methods were giving the same conclusion.
“Dr. Dahn is such a big name in the industry, that the industry listened,” he says, when they started sharing these advances. Not only did they listen, the industry started coming to ask where they could get this equipment.
“Enough big names asked that question that in 2013 we started NOVONIX (the name is a play on the words Nova Scotia and electronics) to commercialize and sell testing equipment to improve the pace of research and development.”
Customers included heavy hitters such as GM, Robert Bosch and ATL (later CATL), the world’s biggest battery company, which later also invested in the company.
“We had customers before we even built the product. We started selling all over the world, to tier one labs, to let them use this technique we developed.”
While still working with NOVONIX, Dr. Burns took on another opportunity. Dr. Dahn had established a partnership with Telsa, which supported his lab, and they wanted to set up a lab in Halifax. In 2015, Dr. Burns joined Tesla as a senior research engineer.
At Tesla, he again started to see opportunities. Dr. Burns saw both a problem and an opportunity in the fact that China makes about 98 per cent of battery grade graphite, a necessary material in batteries. Relying on these markets presented a potential risk. They wanted to see if they could localize production, to power the North American market. Dr. Burns spent two years in the battery graphite landscape looking into this. In 2017, he left Tesla, to help advance synthetic graphic production in North America.
At the same time, Graphite Corp, an Australian business looking to mine graphite, acquired NOVONIX. They kept the name, invested in more research and development in Halifax, and started a U.S. branch of the company to produce synthetic graphite. Dr. Burns ran the Canadian side of the business until 2020 when he took over as CEO of the entire operation, which employs about 200 people.
In seven years, they’ve attracted and signed contracts with tier 1 companies like Panasonic, Stellantis and PowerCo who are interested in the technology; have been awarded an estimated $1 billion in U.S. government funding; and raised about $350 million in equity. The first plant in Tennessee is expected to start production around the end of this year.
As the company enters this new stage of its evolution, now with a different set of challenges in front of it, Dr. Burns says he stepped back as CEO so the company can look for someone with the right experience and skillset as they begin the journey to become a large-scale supplier of high capacity long-life synthetic graphite.
While he still actively supports NOVONIX as strategic advisor, he won’t be involved fulltime, and he is looking forward to new interesting challenges that may come his way.
Being able to adapt and understand opportunities in front of you is an exciting prospect, he said.
“I had opportunity to start at Tesla and it opened those doors. We identified a problem in the graphite and started looking into the battery supply chain and energy independence, and it was all about seizing the opportunity in front of you.
“I never would have guessed 12 years ago that this would have happened.”
His advice for others? Explore the space you’re in, take risks, and see what you can accomplish.
“These things can stem from small core founding principles.”
At NOVONIX, Dr. Burns says he always knew they had a great opportunity to work in a global market. From day one, their customers were household names.
Later, he could also see the battery supply chain was going to be a global issue with the graphite controlled mainly by China. “If you’re in the right place, at the right time, you can take advantage of being there and really deliver something important,” he says.
Dr. Burns says if you can find opportunity in the earlier stages of these market cycles, before something becomes popular, it opens a foothold to big opportunities. They may take some time to develop, but it can open doors.
“It can be difficult to look beyond the day-to-day,” he says, “to step back and to see where the industry is going to be in the next five years, to see where the research can go.”
But if you can get out of the weeds and see the impact of what the research will be, it can make all the difference.
