This is the current "what I've been up to" feed.
I am excited to lead this semester's first Chem/Biochem Journal Club meeting on February 20. We will discuss Metallic Oxides and the Overlooked Role of Bandwidth , an engaging Chemistry of Materials paper connecting solid-state chemistry with electronic-structure concepts. If you are curious and want to attend, please reach out by email.
Thank you to the UCSB team for such a fascinating piece of research.
I received a DCOMP travel award to attend the Global Physics Summit 2026 in Denver, Colorado. I will be presenting my electron localization function (ELF) work that I first shared at NeurIPS AI4Mat.
In late January, I attended the Gordon Research Conference on Multifunctional Materials and Structures in Ventura, California. I presented two posters: one on machine-learning-guided discovery of complex metal superhydrides and one on symmetry-aware deep-learning prediction of electron localization functions. It was a great chance to exchange ideas across disciplines and build new research connections.
Our lab's two most recent publications were featured on the CSUN Department of Science and Mathematics news site: one highlighting our machine-learning-guided materials discovery work (article link) and another covering pressure-induced redox reversal of iron in deep-Earth conditions (article link).
I received a travel grant to attend NeurIPS AI4Mat 2025 and presented two posters there. One shares our JACS study on batch discovery of complex metal superhydrides and how template-guided ML accelerates the search for high-pressure materials (PDF). The other covers an in-progress symmetry-aware 3D-UNet that predicts electron localization functions from superposed atomic density grids with promising early accuracy (PDF).
Our group's work on pressure-driven redox reversal of iron and its role in element distribution deep in Earth was featured by CSUN Newsroom. The piece highlights how computational evidence for iron's redox reversal points to new bonding pathways for p-block elements under extreme pressure and can reshape models of core formation and evolution. Read the story.