Carbon materials have been playing a significant role in the development of alternative clean and sustainable energy technologies, and have been widely used in the electrochemical energy storage and conversion devices, such as lithium-ion batteries, fuel cells, and supercapacitors. Recent studies have shown that carbon materials can be purposely doped with heteroatoms (including boron, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur, etc), to further tailor and modulate their properties and performance for electrochemical energy related applications. For example, the emerging carbon material graphene has been doped with nitrogen to modify the physicochemical properties and electronic structure, and improve the activity and durability of the electrocatalysts towards methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) and oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) (as shown in Fig.1). Several other examples, such as the heteroatom doped carbon as conducting additive of electrode materials in lithium-ion batteries, and as electrode materials in supercapacitors, will also be included and briefly discussed. Fig.1 Illustration of nitrogen doped graphene based electrocatalysts for methanol oxidation and oxygen reduction reaction.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51372178, No. 21003075) and the Natural Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of Hubei Province of China (No. 2013CFA021).