Great overview and imo great for new students in electronic structure: pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Nice article on our oxide work with quotes from our newest grad students! news.iu.edu/college/live...

Happy to announce that our group received a Department of Energy Early Career Research Program (DoE ECRP) award (Correlated Electron Materials with Novel Quantum Building Blocks, DOE DE-SC0026069; of 875K/5years) through the Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics program 🎉.

After the success of the 'tips on how to get a faculty job' videos (1.5K views on one of them 🎉 , and two invited talks on the topic!), I thought I would add a video with a few tips on my first few years on the tenure track: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cgy...

With the group members who are volunteering at ScienceFest! Madison Genslinger, Bipasha Samanta, and Varsha Kumari . The roses are meant to be dunked in liquid nitrogen and shattered 😬.

Many congratulations to Varsha Kumari , our PhD student (co-advised with @saraskrabalak.bsky.social ) who gave an amazing talk and an excellent closed door examination - as her entire committee agreed. 🎉 Very proud of you Varsha.

Come this Tuesday, October 21st at 4pm to see Varsha Kumari's talk, who will present her theory from our group and experiment in Sara Skrabalak's group, spanning correlated electrons from molecular orbitals and photoluminescence from lone pairs in solids! events.iu.edu/event/200948...

🎉 Congrats to Varsha Kumari & Julia Bauer on our paper, “Molecular Orbital Symmetry-Driven Trimer Formation in Kagome Correlated Electron Materials,” accepted in RSC Materials Chemistry C! 👏 pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a... #MaterialsScience #QuantumMaterials #Chemistry

🎉 Honored to receive the 2025 Oxide Electronics Prize for Excellence in Research at #iWOE in Banff, Canada! Grateful to my mentors, mentees & collaborators. This recognition reflects years of shared work on correlated materials & superlattices. Thanks to @jenf.bsky.social for the pics!

We are happy to welcome Dr Mai Nguyen as a postdoctoral scholar into our group 🎉 ! She comes to us from UT Austin, and brings a wealth of expertise in electronic structure methods, including for high entropy alloy nanoparticles, battery materials, ionic transport and more!

New group picture.

We are searching for a new postdoc to join us. Plane wave DFT plus teach us something new (battery materials? Correlated electrons? Nanoparticles?) www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/deta...

In work led by undergraduate student Emily Ward, we show how to build Wannier functions that allow visualization and interpretation of lone pairs in a solid, as well as complex bonding interactions in metal oxyhalides. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... Image: a lone pair in BiOCl.

My video on correlated electron materiasl has reached nearly 4K views! Glad so many people found it useful: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp_f...

Many thanks to Bipasa Samanta, the postdoc in our group, who performed the calculations and taught me about the connection between bond angles in perovskites and conjugation in organic molecules, and to Ricardo for inviting us to this collaboration.

New work with my postdoc Bipasa Samanta on superconducting nickelates. After showing a remarkably strong correlation between in-plane Ni-O-Ni bond angles and Tc in La3Ni2O7, we investigate the effects of other factors (strain, correlations, layer number) on the likely Tc. arxiv.org/abs/2506.11427

We congratulate Varsha Kumari for winning a teaching award. She did a wonderful job teaching with me Intro to physical chemistry and the Surface Chemistry class. In one evaluation, a student answered the question 'How can she improve?' by saying 'Nothing. She's doing amazing'.

Awesome job Varsha Kumari and Bipasa Samanta presenting your work with a talk on trimer formation in Kagome materials and a poster on superconducting nickelates at the Midwest theoretical chemistry conference in Detroit!

🎉 Congrats to the MRS Student Chapter at Indiana University MRS at IU especially 2024–25 President @michaelakloveless.bsky.social , for earning a mini-grant for Bringing SMILES! They'll 3D print glowing toys & teach photoluminescence at Science Fest this fall! 💡🧸 #SciComm #MRS

New work led by our excellent PhD student Varsha Kumari (with early contributions from Julia Bauer, now at Yale): we show that triangular cluster formation in Kagome multiferroics is driven by trimer orbital symmetry & intermediate correlation strength. arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2505.13659

Happy to have contributed to this complex collaborative work - now in PRX - showing that infinite layer nickelate superconductors may be more different from cuprates than we thought: they may be superconducting even in the absence of doping: journals.aps.org/prx/abstract...

Congratulations to our student Emily Ward, who graduated with the highest award from the department, and pursued both theory and experiment as an undergraduate student. Her curiosity, drive, and kindness will be missed. We wish her good luck during her Phd at Princeton!

Last day of volunteering at IU Care Week. It was maybe as helpful for me as it was for the students: I could feel helpful without handing out work/assignments/grades. Just bagels and cream cheese, no added pressure or stress on anybody. And if you know me you know I love feeding people 😬😂.

Lived my dream of running a food cart at IU Care Week, serving students breakfast. Downside: my dream is not for me. My wrists are weak and hands are shaky.

My PhD student Rajbanul Akhond brought me this amazing Naga pickle. Delicious. Works on everything.

Helped out at IU Care Week for two hours today, serving coffee, tea, bagels and snacks to students during their last week of class.

Last year some finches built their next close to my feeders, on top of a wall. This week the old nest fell on the ground. What I didn't see last year was that the finches also used the cotton I left them for the nest! It looks like it must have been pretty comfortable.

This is my 'Ph.D Defense and Qualifying Exam Questions' notebook. I write down all my scary intimidating theorist questions on it as part of a student's Ph.D committee. Questions as scary as the monster drawn on it. 😤

In work now in ACS Nano, we showed how magnetic order propagates in a complex system: double perovskite superlattices! Amazing experimental work by Jonathan Spring and Marta Gibert who invited me to work on this; I just wrote some scripts in Matlab: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

In work led by undergraduate student Emily Ward, we show how to build Wannier functions that allow visualization and interpretation of lone pairs in a solid, as well as complex bonding interactions in metal oxyhalides. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... Image: a lone pair in BiOCl.

Feeding squirrels with your group is arguably the best group activity on campus.

Awesome work Emily, Bipasa, Varsha and Carina presenting your work at the Electronic Materials & Applications (EMA) conference in Denver last week, part of ACerS (American Ceramics Society)!

Congratulations to Varsha Kumari, for winning the 1st place for the best student presentation at the Electronic Materials and Applications Conference today!

The final version of my work on LK-99 is in @ChemMater. The material is an insulator, even at 'vanilla' DFT level, and the Cu may be a d9, S=1/2 color center in an otherwise transparent material, as a result of a Jahn-Teller Instability: pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

A picture on campus about two weeks ago.

Even more amazing than I thought it would be.

If you are currently in the process of interviewing for faculty positions, here is my 3 video playlist on the topic: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Beams!

In our new collaborative work, now in JACS, we find surprisingly high magnetic exchange (up to 340K!) within Cr S=1/2 spin chains in both experiment and DFT - even though the Cr ions are 6.6A apart. Despite this, there is no magnetic order down to 0.1K. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

The cold made the birds come and eat the whole day.

Congratulations!

Happy to participate and contribute to Caribbean science with one of the plenary talks at te VI Congreso Internacional de la Sociedad Dominicana de Física (VI CI-SoDoFi 2025).

"Quality of Life Returns: The Broader Impact The true value of higher education transcends purely financial measures.[...] From improved health outcomes to greater civic engagement, these advantages create compounding positive effects throughout graduates' lives."

Two extremely useful books for any new faculty, and scientist in general. I bought "Writing Science" for the group library as well.

A nice overview of our mixed machine learning - materials science collaboration during my postdoc at Northwestern, now out: arxiv.org/abs/2412.17283

The last in this series of videos on faculty job applications, on the dreaded (?) chalk/proposal/'informal' talk & some general advice: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR5i...

Glad to see this feature on our collaborative work: www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/article...

Them: Any plans for the holidays? Me: Uh, yeah. Them: Anything exciting? Me: Yeah, very. The plans:

Our group in IU news! news.iu.edu/it/live/news...

Saturday morning shopping from the Blue Aster Studios pop-up shop.