ETA's Anubhav Jain Receives DOE Early Career Research Program Award

May 6, 2015

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab’s) Anubhav Jain has been chosen to receive a financial award from the Early Career Research Program managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Jain is a Research Scientist/Chemist in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Technology Area (ETA), where he focuses on new materials discovery using high-throughput computations.

Jain won the award for “Unraveling Principles for Targeted Band Structure Design Using High‐Throughput Computation with Application to Thermoelectrics Materials Discovery”—a project to develop theoretical approaches based on density functional theory calculations to screen for high figure‐of‐merit thermoelectric materials.

The Early Career Research Program seeks to strengthen the U.S. scientific workforce by supporting exceptional researchers during their early career years. The financial award grants Jain $2.5 million over five years to cover year-round salary and research expenses. He was one of only 44 scientists nationwide to receive the 2015 award; recipients were chosen based on peer review of about 620 proposals.

Jain received his BE in Applied & Engineering Physics from Cornell University and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Gerbrand Ceder. He is a recipient of the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship and the Luis W. Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellowship.

At Berkeley Lab, his major projects are the Materials Project and the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) battery hub. The Materials Project, which serves more than 4,500 users worldwide, is a multi-institution effort to accelerate materials discovery by computing the properties of all known inorganic properties. This is achieved by automating first-principles calculations on a massive scale at DOE supercomputing centers. His role in the JCESR battery hub is to uncover novel electrolytes for next-generation batteries using high-throughput computations to efficiently screen among thousands of candidates.

Jain is the primary author of the FireWorks code for automating calculations at supercomputing centers, and currently serves as an executive member of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) Users Group.