News

April 03, 2020

Congratulations to Julija Vinckeviciute for remotely defending her thesis titled "First-principles study of layered transition-metal oxides and sulfides for battery applications."

December 03, 2019

Congratulations to Harsha Gunda for defending his doctoral thesis titled "Thermodynamic modeling of interstitials in Ti alloys."

April 22, 2019

John C. Thomas, Jonas Kaufman, and Julija Vinckeviciute attended the 2019 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting held in Phoenix. John presented his work on hamiltonians and order parameters in the Mathematics of Nanoscale Structures and 2D Materials session, while Jonas and Julija gave talks in the Next-Generation Intercalation Batteries symposium.

December 13, 2018

Congratulations to Jonathon for successfully defending his thesis. Pictured here with his parents.

November 28, 2018

Congratulations to John Giori who successfully defended his thesis. In the coming months, he will be continuing to develop CASM in the Van der Ven group.

November 28, 2018

Members and alumni of the Van der Ven group meet after presenting and attending talks at the Materials Research Society Fall meeting in Boston, MA. From left to right: Jonathon Bechtel, John C. Thomas, Max Radin, and Elizabeth Decolvenaere.

November 10, 2018

John Thomas and Jonathon Bechtel develop a quaternion cluster expansion to describe the interactions between molecules in a crystal as a function of their orientational degrees of freedom. This new class of effective Hamiltonians will help describe important properties of hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites.

 

 

October 26, 2017

Congratulations to Anirudh for defending his Ph.D. thesis titled "Towards an understanding of precipitation and solid-state phase transformation in alloys." In his talk, Anirudh discussed his first-principles work on precipitate formation and phase transformations in rare earth Magnesium alloys. More details can be found in his thesis.

September 14, 2017

Elizabeth Decolvenaere defended her thesis titled "Improving Ab-initio Simulations of Ordering Phenomena in Transition Meral Alloys" on September 14th, 2017. In her talk, she discussed her work on testing predictions from density functional theory at finite temperatures and a cluster expansion approach to magnetic hardening. Details on these and other projects can be found in her thesis.

August 19, 2017

On August 17th, 2017, Dr.Max Radin (upper left) and Julija Vinckeviciute (lower left) presented a creative poster at the North American Solid State Chemisttry Conference (NASSCC) about their work on battery materials. The poster was a collaboration with Molleigh Preefer (upper right) and Nicole Schauser (lower right) from Prof. Ram Seshadri's group.

July 27, 2017

Anirudh Natarajan receives the Acta Student Award of 2016 for his paper "On the early stages of precipitation in dilute Mg–Nd alloys” published in Acta Materialia in 2016. 

March 18, 2017

Dr. John C. Thomas, Jonathon Bechtel, and Elizabeth Decolvenaere presented talks at the APS March Meeting 2017.

March 03, 2017

John Goiri, Anirudh Raju Natarajan, and Naga Sri Harsha Gunda presented talks at the 2017 TMS Meeting.

December 01, 2016

Dr. John C. Thomas, Dr. Maxwell Radin, Anirudh Raju Natarajan, and Julija Vinckeviciute presented talks at the 2016 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit.