MS&E Seminar: Dr. Daniel Shoemaker

Speaker: Dr. Daniel Shoemaker
Affiliation: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Finding trees in deserts and forests: Prospects for navigating inorganic phase space

Correlated-electron materials, transparent conducting oxides, and photovoltaic absorbers are all areas where simple chemical rules suggest that combinations of certain elements might produce functional compounds. Finding novel compounds may be our goal to improve functionality, but we must remember that novelty is socioeconomic, not thermodynamic. When discovery is the aim, we consider the kinetic factors that influenced how materials were made and reported. I will discuss how we look for interesting compounds, the trees, in spaces that were previously seen to be bare or bountiful. The approach is embodied in our collaborative work on structure prediction with evolutionary algorithms and in-situ exploration of ruthenium sulfides, new compounds in our search for Sn-based oxide conductors, and in-situ mapping of kinetic barriers in iron-based semiconductors.

Biography:

Dr. Daniel Shoemaker received his BS in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois in 2006 and his PhD in Materials from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010. His doctoral work focused on using neutron scattering and real-space modeling to understand the structure-property relationships of disordered magnetic and electronic oxides. In 2011 he began a postdoctoral appointment in the Materials Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory where he investigated the synthesis of superconductors and semiconductors with a focus on in situ spectroscopy and x-ray diffraction. He joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor in August 2013. His awards include an MRS Graduate Student Gold Award, the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center Louis Rosen Thesis Award, and an Early Career Award from the US Department of Energy.

 

 

 

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Apr 21, 2017
10:30 am - 12:00 pm

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