MSE Seminar: Joseph Bennett (UMBC)

The Discovery and Design of New Materials as Multifunctional Platforms

The design and discovery of new materials to be used as platforms for functional properties can be expedited by investigating already synthesized and characterized compounds whose merits may have been previously overlooked. Here we use a data-enabled methods that combine searchable databases, group theory, and first-principles density functional theory calculations to create new materials to function over a wide range of chemical environments. First, we investigate a family of known A2BX3 compounds as solid state materials for solar harvesting and energy storage, and then use inorganic chemistry and group theory to explain how distortions in the 1D chains present in the structure types can lead to the microscopic mechanisms of ferroelectricity and antiferroelectricity that we predict. Second, we employ a DFT + Solvent Ion model to create new 2D magnetic materials out of 3D ABX compounds in aqueous media and explore how their thermodynamics of surface transformations change as a function of composition. Taken altogether, these methods lead to new examples of functional materials and elucidate the synthetic routes to create them.

Bio:
Joe Bennett has been at UMBC since 2019, where he spent two years as a pre-faculty fellow before being promoted to assistant professor in 2021. His interests span computation and synthesis, and he is passionate about workforce development via training student researchers at all levels of experience. His lab designs new ferroic materials and investigates mineral oxide surface transformation thermodynamics. During the summer he trains students interested in art conservation science how to use DFT methods.

Prof. Bennett attended Drexel University and obtained a B.S. in chemistry, where his undergraduate student research was in the field of bio-inspired inorganic chemistry and his education outreach was sponsored by the Science in Motion program. In 2003 he began research as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, working under the co-mentorship of Prof. Andrew M Rappe (chemistry) and Prof. Peter K. Davies (MSE) to uncover how defects and changes in composition could affect perovskite materials. After obtaining his Ph.D. in chemistry, his postdoctoral work with Prof. Karin M. Rabe of Rutgers University’s Department Physics and Astronomy was devoted to mapping out underexplored structure types as functional materials, research that he continues to this day. He then spent a decade in industry, as a consultant, and then as a research specialist at the University of Iowa, working with Sara E. Mason, now of Brookhaven National Lab.