About

The research has moved across four countries and five kinds of material. The question underneath has not changed.

The doctorate, at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg with Wolfram Hergert and Valeri Stepanyuk, turned to magnetism in one dimension: chains of transition-metal atoms on stepped copper surfaces, their exchange interactions, anisotropies, and finite-temperature order. The substrate, it turned out, decides the magnetism — a theme that returned in 2026 as substrate-controlled electronic phases of plumbene.

At the University of Michigan (2015–2017, with John Kieffer and Jinsang Kim), the same first-principles tools were pointed at organic semiconductors: how conjugation length, halogen substitution, and cage geometry set the energy levels that govern light absorption and emission. This is where the excited-state and interface toolkit was built.

Two research positions followed: as an NRC Fellow at the Air Force Research Laboratory (2017–2019), phosphorene growth on vicinal metals, phosphorus heterostructures, and doping of β-Ga₂O₃; and as a Research Scientist at Toyota Research Institute of North America (2019–2021), plumbene, topological materials, and the defect chemistry of battery electrolytes and cathodes. A year as Lecturer at Kettering University preceded the move to Rose-Hulman in 2022.

At Rose-Hulman the threads were tied together: defects (from diamond to hBN), magnetism (from Fe wires to doped plumbene and rhombohedral graphene), layers (from phosphorene to SnTe/NbSe₂), and ions (from Toyota electrolytes to FeOCl) — each now driven by undergraduate researchers, and each ending in a prediction an experiment can test.