MS&E Seminar: Professor Jose L. Mendoza-Cortes

Speaker: Jose L. Mendoza-Cortes, Assistant Professor

Affiliation: Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, Florida State University

Materials by Design and Machine Learning: Applications to Artificial Photosynthesis and Energy Storage

Computational chemistry and materials science algorithms are now powerful enough that they can predict many properties of materials and molecules before they are synthesized. By implementing and developing new approaches to calculate materials and chemical properties in supercomputers, we have predicted over 100,000 materials for energy storage and catalysis. The computations predicted several new materials, which were made and tested in the lab. The creation of our large amount of materials in-silico, has prompted to create our own type of materials genomes for different purposes. We have implemented different machine learning methods using these materials genomes to find further materials design principles. Some of the applications of the design principles of materials has been used towards developing an alternative way to generate and store energy; specifically artificial photosynthesis, i.e. conversion of sunlight into chemical fuels and other ways to store energy.

About the Speaker

Dr. Mendoza-Cortes received his Ph.D. from CalTech in 2012 and did his PDF from UC Berkeley in 2014. In January 2015, Dr. Mendoza-Cortes started as assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at the FAMU-FSU Joint College of Engineering, comprised by Florida A&M University (FAMU) and Florida State University (FSU). Dr. Mendoza-Cortes also holds faculty appointments at the Department of Physics, Scientific Computing, Material Sciences & Engineering Program, High Performance Materials Institute and Condensed Matter Theory at the National High Magnetic Field Lab at FSU.

Dr. Mendoza-Cortes have worked in the field of Theoretical and Computational Material Sciences, Physics and Chemistry for more than 12 years. His group specialized on molecular dynamics and quantum mechanical simulations. His journal publications are around 20, which have been highly cited in the scientific literature with over 3,888 total citations, or an average of around 215 citations per paper. Because of graduate and post-graduate studies advisors, Dr. Mendoza-Cortes’ academic great grandparents are Marie Curie and Paul Dirac. Dr. Mendoza-Cortes has changed fields several times. First, he was a mathematician, which turned into a Chemist, then into a physicist, then into a computer scientist, then into an engineer, and so on. However, right now Dr. Mendoza-Cortes is focusing on multiscale simulations of (old and new) materials.

Dr. Mendoza-Cortes has pioneered concepts for Materials by Design in combination with atomistic simulations and experiments. The first example was published in Science magazine and was awarded the 2007 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, which is the AAAS’s oldest and most prestigious award. His recent research about designing new materials for energy conversion was featured in Forbes magazine, CNBC and the Department of Energy highlights. In 2016, he obtained a grant from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, DOE to develop new multiscale methods for materials design. This DOE grant is to develop the next generation of codes and software for computational materials physics and chemistry. In 2016, he also obtained a grant (as Co-PI) from the National Science Foundation to investigate the fundamental degradation of Lithium batteries and their further improvement. More recently, he also obtained funding from NVIDIA, the largest GPU maker in the world, to develop new computational methods on this new computing architecture.

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Mar 16, 2018
10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Location:
2101 Engineering V
420 Westwood Plaza Los Angeles CA 90095