People
Principal Investigator
Marco Bernardi - CV
Marco Bernardi is a Professor of Applied Physics, Physics and Materials Science at Caltech. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science from MIT, where he worked with Jeff Grossman on novel materials and physical processes for energy conversion. He was a postdoc in the Physics Department at UC Berkeley, where working with Steven Louie and Jeffrey Neaton he developed new quantitative approaches to study the dynamics of excited electrons in materials. Marco's group at Caltech develops quantum mechanical calculations to understand electron interactions and dynamics in condensed matter, with application to (opto)electronics, energy, ultrafast science and quantum technology. Among other recognitions, Marco received the Franco Strazzabosco Award in 2020, the NSF CAREER Award in 2018, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award in 2017, the Psi-K Volker Heine Young Investigator Award for electronic structure theory in 2015, and the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship in 2013. His work favors quantitative analysis and accurate computational approaches to understand the physics and potential applications of novel materials, charting new directions in materials theory.
Email: bmarco at caltech.edu
Phone: (626) 395-2515
Address: Caltech, 1200 E California Blvd. MC 107-81, Pasadena CA, 91125
Postdocs
Ivan Maliyov
Ivan received a BSc in Applied Physics from V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine. He obtained his MSc degree in Nanosciences from École Polytechnique and Univérsité Paris-Saclay in France. With a double-diploma program, he has also received a MSc in Medical Physics from V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Ukraine. He obtained his Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Physics from Univérsité Paris-Saclay, France in 2019 and joined our group in December 2019. His current research interests are on electron transport and dynamics in the presence of external fields, magnetotransport in complex materials, and time-dependent density functional theory.
Email: imaliyov at caltech.edu
Jinsoo Park
Jin-Soo received his BS degree in Electrical Engineering with a double major in Physics from Seoul National University. His undergraduate research focused on band gap engineering of BN-doped graphene using first-principles methods. His research also explored light-matter interactions in metallic nanostructures using time-dependent density functional perturbation theory. Jin-Soo joined our group in 2017 and received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Caltech in 2022. His current research interests include electron-phonon coupling in materials with spin-orbit interactions.
Email: jpark7 at caltech.edu
Students
Benjamin K. Chang
Benjamin received B.S. in Interdisciplinary Sciences from National Tsing Hua University, and M.S. in Physics from National Taiwan University under the supervision of Prof. Mei-Yin Chou. Before Caltech, He was a research assistant at the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences at Academia Sinica where he continued his master's study on high-perfomance thermoelectric materials. Benjamin joined Caltech Applied Physics in 2018. His current research involves the development and application of computational methods for systems with strong correlation and electron-phonon interactions.
Email: bkchang at caltech.edu
Dhruv Desai
Dhruv received his BS in Engineering Physics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019. His undergraduate research was focused on image reconstruction of high density materials using Muon tomography. He also interned at Fermilab for a summer, working on computational studies of beam diffusion measurements using beam echoes. Dhruv joined the Caltech Applied Physics program in 2019, and his current research involves first principles calculation of magneto-transport phenomena in semiconductors and topological semimetals.
Email: ddesai at caltech.edu
Kelly Yao
Kelly received her BS in Physics from Rice University in 2019. In her undergraduate research she did theoretical investigations on the collisional properties of ultracold nonreactive molecules. For a summer she also worked on modeling charge distributions of twisted bilayer graphene at Cornell University. Kelly joined the Caltech Physics program in 2019, and her current research interest focuses on first-principle calculation of electron-phonon dynamics.
Email: jyyao at caltech.edu
Khoa Le
Khoa obtained his BS in Mathematics and Chemistry at University of Houston in 2020. In his undergraduate research, he studied Förster resonance energy transfer in fluorescent protein, and singlet fission dynamics for a pair of molecules. In Summer 2019, Khoa also worked at NIST Boulder to study atomic flux circuits for the manufacture of chip-scale atomic devices. Khoa joined Caltech Chemistry program in 2020 and he is currently focusing on the study of magnon and phonon interaction in magnetic materials.
Email: kle at caltech.edu
Yao Luo
Yao obtained his BS degree in Physics at Nanjing University (NJU). His undergraduate research was focused on phase transitions in strongly correlated systems using quantum many-body techniques and functional renormalization (fRG) under the surpervision of Prof. Qianghua Wang. Yao entered the graduate program in Caltech Applied Physics in 2021. His current research interests include developing many-body first-principles methods for polarons.
Email: yluo7 at caltech.edu
David Abramovitch
David received his BA in physics from the University of California Berkeley in 2021. He performed undergraduate research in the group of Liang Tan at LBNL which focused on the interplay of anharmonic lattice dynamics and electronic structure in halide perovskites using tight binding models. David entered the Caltech graduate program in applied physics in 2021. His research interests include combining dynamical mean field theory and ab initio electron phonon methods to treat strongly correlated materials.
Email: dabramovitch at caltech.edu
Shaelyn Iyer
Shaelyn received her BS degree in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Physics from Northwestern University. Her undergraduate research involved combining high throughput density functional theory and machine learning to predict the properties of materials such as metal-organic frameworks and catalysts. For a summer she computationally studied defects in nanodiamonds for quantum sensing applications. Shaelyn joined the Caltech Applied Physics program in 2021. Her current research involves first principles calculations of spin transport phenomena in semiconductors.
Email: smiyer at caltech.edu
Ina M. Sorensen
Ina received her MEng in Materials Science at the University of Oxford in 2015. In her undergraduate research she worked on simulating scanning transmission electron microscopes and the interplay between strain and interband transitions. In 2016 she received an MSc in Computer Animation and Visual Effects from Bournemouth University and went on to work with Oliver James at the visual effects studio DNeg. She spent several years in industry working as a R&D Software Developer before entering the Caltech graduate programme in physics in 2019. Her current research interests include electron-electron scattering and hydrodynamics.
Email: isorense at caltech.edu
Former Group Members
Postdocs
Sergio Pineda-Flores (2021-2022) –
Shiyuan Gao (2019-2022) – Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University
Jin-Jian Zhou (2016-2020) – Assistant Professor of Physics at Beijing Institute of Technology
Luis Agapito (2015-2018) – Software Engineer at Synopsis, Inc.
Raffaello Bianco (2018-2019) – Postdoctoral Researcher at University of the Basque Country
Graduate Students
Vatsal Jhalani (2014-2019) – Postdoctoral Researcher at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
Nien-En Lee (2015-2020) – Engineer at MediaTek, Inc.
I-Te Lu (2014-2020) – Postdoctoral Fellow at Max Planck Institute for the Structure of Matter, Hamburg
Hsiao-Yi Chen (2016-2021) – Postdoctoral Fellow at RIKEN, Japan
Xiao Tong (2017-2022) –
Jinsoo Park (2017-2022) – Postdoctoral Researcher at Caltech
Undergraduate
Kyle Frohna (2016) – Graduate Student at Cambridge University
Bahdan Zviazhynski (2019) – Graduate Student at Cambridge University
Shreshth Malik (2019) – Graduate Student at University College London