News
4/9/22 - Accepted an offer to join the University of Minnesota as an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science (link), starting 8/1/2022. Can’t wait to get started in this new position
2/1/22 - Pleasure fulfilling an invitation from Journal of Materials Science for their special issue on Compuatational Materials Design. In this review article, I tried to describe how thermodynamic stability is calculated from first principles in such a manner to be accessible to theorists new to the field or experimentalists wanting to learn more about these approaches (paper). Hopefully I did OK (if so, thanks to Nathan Szymanski and Matt McDermott for essential comments on an early draft)
1/10/22 - One more very nice collaboration as part of JCESR, this time showing how defective manganese oxides show potential as cathode materials for Ca-ion batteries, out in Chemistry of Materials (paper)
1/7/22 - New work led by Dr. Ryan Kingsbury in the Persson group comparing the performance, convergence, and cost of recently introduced meta-GGA functionals published in Physical Review Materials (paper)
1/3/22 - Nice to start the new year with my last paper from the University of Colorado out in the Journal of the American Ceramics Society. Led by recent graduatee Becky O’Toole, showing how ALD coatings can work as a sintering aid and protective barrier for AlN (paper)
12/23/21 - Happy to see PhD student Yu Chen’s first paper online in Chemistry of Materials. Great collaboration between experiment (synthesis + neutron diffraction) and theory (AIMD) to understand Ca mobility in a candidate solid-state conductor (paper)
11/15/21 - Enjoyed working with Argonne as part of JCESR searching for layered materials that may be good cathodes for Ca-ion batteries, published in Advanced Energy Materials (paper)
11/12/21 - Pleased to write a Preview in Patterns for great work from Prashun Gorai and colleagues at Colorado School of Mines on data-centric ML for materials (preview, paper)
11/2/21 - Excited to return to in-person conferences with AIChE in Boston! Presenting at the faculty candidates poster session Sunday 11/7 (poster, abstract) and in the faculty candidates in COMSEF session Monday 11/8 (abstract, mostly on our recent paper in Advanced Materials)
10/1/21 - New work led by Dr. Bin Ouyang exploring the exciting and complex space of NASICON materials for Na batteries, published today in Nature Communications (paper)
9/2/21 - Another JCESR collaboration out today in ACS Organic and Inorganic Au (paper). Tremendous solid-state synthesis efforts led by Ken Poeppelmeier’s group at Northwestern with supporting calculations from us in the Ceder group. Excited to see what comes of the many post-spinel phases newly reported in this work.
8/18/21 - Happy to see a model we developed during my Ph.D. for finite temperature predictions (paper) is now incorporated in the Materials Project database (link) and pymatgen code base (link).
7/28/21 - Enjoyed sharing some of our work on solid-state synthesis prediction at the North American Solid-State Chemistry Conference (link). A really well-organized virtual meeting.
7/15/21 - More work on Mg batteries with JCESR out today in ACS Materials Letters, this time in collaboration with U. of Waterloo explaining what limits redox activity in Mg thiospinel cathodes (paper)
7/8/21 - The results of a great collaboration with Argonne National Lab and JCESR out today in JACS. Understanding the complex electrochemical behavior of MgCrMnO4 as a cathode for Mg batteries (paper)
5/27/21 - Two papers in one week for PhD student Nathan Szymanski! This one in Chemistry of Materials on using deep learning to automate phase ID from X-ray diffraction patterns (paper, code)
5/26/21 - Happy to receive recognition from Materials Horizons as an Outstanding Reviewer for 2020 (link). It’s a pleasure to contribute to this emerging top journal in the field
5/26/21 - Our review on the autonomous design and synthesis of inorganic materials is out today in Materials Horizons (paper). Thrilled to be working with the Ceder group on this exciting new area in materials science
5/24/21 - Our article on YBCO in Advanced Materials received a nice highlight in Nature Reviews Materials (highlight)
5/4/21 - Another successful collaboration with Prof. Akira Miura and Hokkaido University published today in Advanced Materials (paper, press release). We use thermodynamic calculations (from DFT and a ML descriptor from my previous work) along with in situ XRD and TEM (see the TEM movie here) to understand the formation of the classic superconductor YBCO during solid-state synthesis
3/18/21 - Invited talk given at virtual TMS-2021 on our efforts to understand phase evolution during solid-state synthesis. Thanks to the organizers for the invitation. (YouTube, paper)
11/27/20 - Back on the virtual conference circuit, this time at Fall MRS. Hear about error cancellation (or lack thereof) in machine learning predictions of material stability (YouTube) and a two-minute pitch of my research vision as a future faculty member (YouTube)
11/23/20 - New paper in PCCP from our multivalent battery team studying a potential solid-state Ca conductor (paper)
11/16/20 - Making the virtual rounds at AIChE. Giving talks on predictive solid-state synthesis (abstract, paper, YouTube), ML predictions of material stability (abstract, paper, YouTube), and my aspirations to lead a research group of my own (abstract, poster)
10/19/20 - Lecturing in Graduate Thermodynamics and Phase Transformations in Solids at UC Berkeley this week. See Lectures 17-19 for a Stat Mech refresher (YouTube)
7/10/20 - New Ceder group paper in npj Computational Materials showing that ML models for formation energy should really be tested on stability (open access link) with open-source code to repeat our analysis for new models (github)
6/3/20 - A general approach to quickly and accurately screen materials for chemical looping processes published in Advanced Energy Materials (link)
2/24/20 - Collaboration on faster synthesis using solid-state metathesis with Akira Miura and others at Hokkaido University published in Materials Horizons (link)
2/23/20 - Last 1st author paper from PhD at CU-Boulder published in JACS. Thorough analysis of cesium chloride double perovskite optoelectronics (link) + an interactive map
1/16/20 - JCESR paper published in ChemComm on characterizing lanthanide-containing compounds as potential solid-state electrolytes for Mg batteries (link)
1/13/20 - Seminar given to the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech (abstract)
11/10/19 - Presented at the Meet the Faculty Candidate Poster Session at the AIChE Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL (abstract)
8/20/19 - Collaboration with Prof. Jamie Neilson’s group at CSU on solid-state metathesis published in Chemistry of Materials (link)
8/13/19 - Winner of the Team Science Competition at the 2019 EFRC PI Meeting, presenting with Sage Bauers (NREL), with contributions throughout the Center for Next Generation of Materials Design (link)
7/1/19 - Seminar on Ph.D. research presented at the University of Washington Distinguished Young Scholars Seminar Program (YouTube)
6/17/19 - Nature Materials publishes a collaborative effort from the Center for the Next Generation of Materials Design on the discovery of hundreds of new ternary nitrides (link)
5/1/19 - Started position as Postdoctoral Scholar in Prof. Gerbrand Ceder’s group in Materials Science & Engineering at UC-Berkeley
3/28/19 - ML+DFT used to screen materials for ammonia synthesis; published in Materials Discovery issue of ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces (link)
2/1/19 - Work with Prof. Matthias Scheffler’s department at FHI on perovskite stability published in Science Advances (open access link)
1/4/19 - Benchmarking old (PBE) and new (SCAN) density functionals reveals that both do quite well on solid-state stability predictions - published in npj Computational Materials (open access link)
pre-2019 - old news :)