Congratulations to Sesha Sai Behara for defending his thesis titled "First-Principles Study of Thermodynamics and Kinetics of Lithium Alloys for All-Solid-State Batteries".
Congratulations to Jonathan Li and Derick Ober for defending their doctoral theses titled "Thermodynamic and kinetic modeling of transition metal nitrides and battery anodes" and "Thermodynamically-Informed Uncertainty Quantification".
Congratulations to Colleen Reynolds for defending her thesis titled "Niobium and Oxygen: A First Principles Study of Phase Stability and Solute Behavior".
Congratulations to Muna Saber for defending her thesis titled "Ab initio property predictions of Wadsley-Roth phase chemistries as high power density lithium-ion electrode materials".
Congratulations to Jonas Kaufman for defending his doctoral thesis titled "First-principles study of ion ordering and diffusion in layered oxides for Na- and K-ion batteries".
Congratulations to Sanjeev Kolli for defending his thesis titled "Hierarchical crystallographic transformations and thermodynamic and kinetic analysis of spinel electrode materials".
Congratulations to Julija Vinckeviciute for remotely defending her thesis titled "First-principles study of layered transition-metal oxides and sulfides for battery applications."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
