Researchers Receive DOE Early Career Research Awards

In the sixth year of the Early Career Research Program managed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, two researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) were on the list of 44 recipients announced today. The two winners from Berkeley Lab will each receive grants of $2.5M over five years to cover year-round salary plus research expenses. The effort is designed to bolster the nation's scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early career years, when many scientists do their most formative work. This year's Berkeley Lab winners are: Anubhav Jain from the Energy Technologies Area for "Unraveling Principles for Targeted Band Structure Design Using High-Throughput Computation with Application to Thermoelectrics Materials Discovery." As Jain described in his abstract, "Many technological applications - including thermoelectrics, photovoltaics, solid state lighting, and transparent conductors - would attain significantly higher performance and lower cost if one could design materials that exhibit optimal electronic properties...This project will develop theoretical approaches based on density functional theory calculations to screen for high figure-of-merit thermoelectric materials on a large scale and in a multifaceted way." Dani Ushizima of the Computational Research Division for "Scaling Analytics for Image-Based Experimental Data." From Ushizima's proposal, "Department of Energy (DOE) research across a myriad of science domains is increasingly reliant on image-based data from experiments; this project is aim