Biography
Maria Chan is a scientist with the Center for Nanoscale Materials who studies nanomaterials and renewable energy materials, including solar cells and batteries and other energy storage, as well as photo- and electro-catalysts, thermal transport, and thermoelectrics. Particular focus is on using machine learning for efficient computational approaches and for interfacing computational models with materials characterization (x-ray, electron, and scanning probe). She is a senior fellow at the Northwestern Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering, and a fellow of the University of Chicago Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering. She is also an associate editor at the ACS Journal Chemistry of Materials, a member of the Condensed Matter and Materials Research Committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and serves on the advisory boards for the journal APL-Machine Learning, Duke’s aiM-NRT AI training project, and CEDARS EFRC.
Fall 2023: We are hiring postdocs and students! Please email me at mchan@anl.gov for details.
Education
- BSc, Physics and Applied Mathematics, University of California at Los Angeles
- PhD, Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Research topics
- First principles and atomistic modeling of nanomaterials and renewable energy materials, including photovoltaics, energy storage, photo- and electro-catalysts, thermal transport, and thermoelectrics
- Development of first principles and machine learning approaches for materials property prediction
- Methodology and software development for integrating atomistic modeling and experimental measurements
- First principles computation in conjunction with synchrotron x-ray characterization to determine the structure of solid-water interfaces
Current/previous projects
- Center for Nanoscale Materials, Theory and Modeling group: structural and electronic properties of semiconductor nanoparticles, transition-metal dichalcogenides for catalysis, hybrid perovskite photovoltaics, connecting modeling to synchrotron characterization and microscopy techniques
- DOE Early Career Award: development of FANTASTX (Fully Automated Nanoscale To Atomistic Structures from Theory and eXperiments) for determination of structures from x-ray, electron, and scanning probe characterization
- Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials: inter-operable computational modeling codes to model transport at interfaces
- AI/ML at Scientific User Facilities: use of artificial intelligence and machine learning for information extraction from x-ray, electron microscopy, and neutron data
- DOE SBIR/STTR for data management framework, computer vision, and natural language processing towards labeled microscopy data
- Center for Electrochemical Energy Science: high capacity lithium-ion, lithium-oxygen, and hybrid lithium-ion/lithium-oxygen battery materials, solid-electrolyte interphase, surface and interfacial interactions
- DOE EERE Solar Energy Technology Office: grain boundaries and dopants in CdTe photovoltaics, degradation in Si photovoltaics
- DOE ARPA-E SHIELD: nanostructured thermal barrier coatings
- Integrated Imaging to Understand Photocatalysis: photocatalysis on transition oxide metal surfaces, integrated imaging with computational modeling
- Argonne internal projects: computer-vision guided retrieval of microscopy images, intermediate band hybrid perovskite photovoltaics, non-equilibrium thermal transport, non-PGM catalysts
- Industrial sponsors: electronic and lattice thermal transport modeling
Publications
Google Scholar profile
Codes
- https://github.com/MaterialEyes
- https://github.com/josh-mutian/grain-boundary-genie
Data
Published datasets at the Materials Data Facility
Lectures and seminars
- 2022 Artificial Intelligence in Computational Materials Science MRS Webinar
- 2021 Modeling and Machine Learning of X-ray Absorption Spectra for Energy Materials: XAS Journal Club
- Tutorial on machine learning of impurity levels by former postdoc Arun Mannodi Kannakithodi
- Cell Press Webinar “Machine learning impurity levels in semiconductors”
- Argonne Outloud presentation “From Atoms to Clean Energy Technologies”
Awards
- 2022 Sam Bader Award
- 2021 Physical Science & Engineering Directorate Excellence Award
- 2020 DOE Early Career Award
- 2017 Argonne Outstanding Postdoctoral Supervisor Award
Research News
- 2023 Artificial Intelligence for Materials Discovery (Communications of the ACM)
- 2022 Staff Spotlight
- 2022 Boundaries in NMC battery materials
- 2022 Perovskite design
- 2021 CdTe solar cell
- 2021 Borophane
- 2021 Validating first principles molecular dynamics simulations
- 2019 Ultrafast dynamics in perovskite halides
- 2018 Low Pt catalyst for fuel cells
- 2016 Machine learned interatomic potential for IrO2
- 2013 Hybrid Li-ion/Li-O2 batteries
Current postdoctoral/predoctoral associates
- Dr Luqing Wang (Google Scholar)
- Dr Joshua Paul (Google Scholar)
- Dr Arun Baskaran (Google Scholar)
- Dr Chaitanya Kolluru (Google Scholar)(former PhD student co-supervised with Professor Richard Hennig)
- Dr Nina Andrejevic (Maria Geoppart Mayer Fellow) (LinkedIn)(Google Scholar)
- Ms Yiming Chen
Current doctoral student
- Ms Sam Tetef (University of Washington, co supervised with Gerald Seidler)
- Mr Shinjan Dutta (Northwestern University, co supervised with Aggelos Katsaggelos)
Current research assistants
- Ms Haili Jia (Johns Hopkins University)
- Ms Annie Xu (University of Washington)
- Mr David Flores (Penn State University)
- Mr Thiago da Silva (Boise State University)
Former postdoctoral associates
- Dr Alper Kinaci (Google Scholar)(LinkedIn)(Now Senior Computational Specialist at Northwestern University)
- Dr Fatih Sen (Google Scholar)(LinkedIn)(Now Senior Scientist, Metallurgy and Modeling at Novelis)
- Dr Liang Li (Google Scholar)(LinkedIn) (Now Founding Engineer @ Novel)
- Dr Yi Xia (Google Scholar)(Now postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University)
- Dr Kendra Letchworth-Weaver (Rahman Named Fellow)(Google Scholar)(LinkedIn)(Now Assistant Professor at James Madison University)
- Dr Denise Ford (Duke University)
- Dr Ji-Sang Park (Website)(Now an Assistant Professor at Kyungpook National University)
- Dr Arun Mannodi Kanakkithodi (Google Scholar)(LinkedIn)(Website)(Now Assistant Professor at Purdue University)
- Dr Joydeep Munshi (Google Scholar)(Now Research Scientist at GE)
- Dr Davis Unruh (Google Scholar)(Now Research Scientist at Samsung)
Former doctoral students
- Dr Chris Buurma (Now Modeling and Simulation Scientist at Battelle)
- Dr Joseph Kubal (visiting from Purdue University)(Now Assistant Chemical Engineer at Argonne National Lab)
- Dr Lynza Sprawl (visiting from Oregon State University)(Now Senior R&D Engineer at Honeywell)
- Dr Mingren Shen (University of Wisconsin Madison, co supervised with Professor Dane Morgan)(Now Software Development Engineer at Amazon)
- Dr Eric Schwenker (Northwestern University, co supervised with Professor Chris Wolverton)(Now Computer Vision Engineer at Path Robotics, Inc.)
- Dr Weixin Jiang (Northwestern University, co supervised with Professor Ollie Coissart)(Now Machine Learning Engineer at Uber)
Former research assistants
- Ms Karen Zheng (UIUC) (Now a Food Scientist)
- Ms Jessi Hartman (UCDavis) (Now PhD student at UIUC)
- Ms Amy Wey (Cornell University) (Now Software Engineer at Galaxy Digital)
- Mr Mutian (Josh) Liu (University of Chicago)(Now Senior Software Engineer at Meta)
- Mr Ryan Pencak (Bucknell University) (Now Software Engineer at NYDIG)
- Mr Michael Toriyama (UIUC) (2018 Barry Goldwater Scholar)(Now PhD student at Northwestern)
- Mr Thierry Wambo (University of Texas San Antonio) (Now Data Scientist at Lockheed Martin)
- Mr Ryan Pederson (Virgnia Tech) (Now PhD student at UC Irvine)
- Ms Grace Lu (Northwestern University) (Now PhD student at UIUC)
- Mr Jackson O’Donnell (LinkedIn)(University of Chicago) (Now PhD student at UC Santa Cruz)
- Mr Spencer Hills (LinkedIn)(Wheaton College) (Now medical student)
- Mr Isaac Malsky (University of Chicago) (Now PhD student at University of Michigan)
- Ms Sarah O’Brien (Northwestern University) (Now Cloud Engineer at Sonos)
- Mr Viraaj Jayaram (University of Chicago) (Now PhD student at Yale)
- Ms Sankhya Hirani (UIUC) (Now PhD student at U Washington)
- Mr Rahim Raja (University of Chicago)
- Mr Marcel Chlupsa (Kansas State University)(Now PhD student at University of Michigan)
- Mr Trevor Spreadbury (MIT)(Now Software Engineer at Data Science Institute (DSI) at the University of Chicago)
- Mr Buduka Ogonor (University of Chicago)
- Ms Victoria Adebayo (Howard University)
- Mr Justin Pothoof (University of Washington)