Wennie Wang
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Materials Science·Early-career
Many energy technologies, from computer memory to hydrogen production, depend on what happens at the scale of single atoms in a material. That includes missing atoms, impurities and the disordered arrangements that form during use.
- Fields
Materials Science
Chemistry
Physics
- Topics
density functional theory
first-principles calculations
computational materials science
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2031
What they work on
- Use first-principles calculations to determine how complex defects in transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers set the energy needed for resistive switching, revealing trends across materials.
- Establish design rules for how interfaces in stacked TMD heterostructures affect resistive switching energy and switching ratio in memristor-like devices.
- Model device-level resistive switching by including explicit electric fields and open-quantum-system transport calculations of current through atomically thin layers.
- Determine how iron incorporation, proton arrangement and octahedral distortions in disordered (oxy)hydroxide electrocatalysts affect oxygen evolution activity, using DFT free-energy calculations.
- Validate atomic models of (oxy)hydroxide catalysts by matching simulated vibrational, X-ray diffraction and X-ray absorption spectra to measurements and electrochemical activity trends.
More about the research
The research uses quantum-mechanical computer simulations, sometimes paired with experiments, to link these atomic features to how a material performs. One project addresses energy-efficient, brain-inspired computing. The other addresses catalysts that split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Why it matters
Computing's energy use is growing fast. Design rules for low-energy switching in atomically thin materials could help chip makers build denser, more efficient memory and brain-inspired hardware. Understanding which kinds of disorder make cheap, earth-abundant catalysts active could guide better catalysts for producing hydrogen from water. Low-carbon hydrogen could serve chemical manufacturing, agriculture and transportation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mihai Vaida
University of Central Florida, FL·Chemistry·Early-career
Track how light-excited charge carriers move at the surface of metal-decorated 2D transition metal dichalcogenide photocatalysts, using pump-probe photoemission spectroscopy with extreme ultraviolet laser pulses at femtosecond resolution.
Daniel Bediako
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Chemistry·Early-career
Synthesize vanadium-intercalated TMD crystals, which have vanadium atoms inserted between layers, that are predicted to be altermagnets, using solid-state synthesis and crystal growth.
Yubo Qi
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Physics
Develop a deep-learning-based, multifunctional computational method that reproduces density functional theory predictions of electron behavior while scaling to systems far larger than direct calculations allow.
The school
University of Texas at Austin: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 871 research doctorates a year.
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