Education & Training
B.A., Chemistry, Cornell University
Ph.D., Materials Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison
McElrath Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Houston
Maria Goeppert Mayer Fellow, Argonne National Lab
Research
What are the chemical forces that underlie the unqiue crystalline structures of solid-state inorganic materials? My group is interested in answering this question by leveraging insight from solid-state chemistry, materials science, physics, and computer science, while hopefully discovering some new materials along the way. Our lab is designed to grow and characterize the structures of intermetallic and semiconducting materials with guidance and support from quantum computational chemistry and machine learning. Some of our main research interests are:
Structure-Properties Relationships in Disordered Materials: Although a canonical crystal has perfect periodic order, in reality many solid-state materials have small defects that substantially impact their properties. We are interested in understanding how the local ordering in disordered materials affects physical properties like electrical and thermal transport. To accomplish this, we grow high-quality single crystals for structural characterization and properties measurement at facilities like the APS at Argonne National Laboratory.
Machine-Learning Guided Discovery: Artificial intelligence is a rapidly emerging technology that has tremendous potential to impact the way we do scientific research. My group is interested in exploring different approaches for using AI to help guide our experimental discovery of new materials.
New Solid-State Synthetic Pathways: Thousand year old alchemical techniques for making solid-state materials are still in use today, but can new synthetic techniques enable the discovery of new materials? We are interested in using mixed metal and metal-salt fluxes to explore new mateirals spaces with unusual chemical and structural features.
Electronic Structures in Quantum Materials: Some materials show unusual eletronic states that are of interest to the condensed matter physics community. My group is interested in combining our expertise in crystal growth with computational approaches to predict and explain the weird physics that happens in these materials.
If you're interested in joining my research lab, send me an email!