Research

I am a theoretical physicist working in the field of statistical mechanics where I use a combination of pen and paper theory and computer simulation to study coarse-grained models of self-assembly, nucleation, and phase transformation. Working at the Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, I collaborate with experimentalists and theorists to tackle problems with application to renewable energy and climate change. I also have a strong interest in scientific computing, algorithm development, and data visualization.

Follow the links below for more details on my areas of research interest.

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Coarse-grained models

Computational physics is hard and even relatively modest problems can quickly become intractable. Enter coarse-grained models, which help provide a simplified view of the physical world; capturing the fundamental details of a system, while ignoring all of the extraneous fluff that is unimportant to the question in hand.

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Supercooled liquids and glasses

It's a liquid... It's a solid... No, it's a glass. How can a material possess the mechanical properties of a solid yet have a molecular structure that is indistinguishable from a liquid? Find out why the glass transition remains one of the most interesting and elusive unsolved problems in the physics community. While there's little of interest in the structure, the dynamics are far from boring.

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Nucleation

Nucleation is all around us and is one of the most important processes in the natural world: the creation of liquid droplets in saturated vapor give rise to clouds, and ice forms from the freezing of water. While classical nucleation theory has been with us for around 100 years, recent improvements in computation and observation suggest that things are often far more complicated than this simple picture predicts.