Hacking Materials
Research Group

computational materials science at berkeley lab

About Us

Led by Dr. Anubhav Jain and located in Berkeley, California (just outside of San Francisco), the Hacking Materials group at LBNL leverages advances in theoretical materials science, supercomputing, and informatics to understand and design new materials for renewable energy applications. We work closely with experimental groups to bring materials from the computer to the laboratory. We currently work mainly on thermoelectric materials, thermal storage materials, and data analytics for solar installations. We also apply natural language processing techniques to extract information from millions of articles in the scientific literature. Our current projects include:

  • The Materials Project, an effort to calculate the properties of all known inorganic materials and beyond
  • Applying natural language processing techniques to the extraction of knowledge from scientific texts
  • Perform computational screening of new materials for electrochemical water purification.
  • Developing new methods to calculate electron and thermal transport of materials.
  • Image analysis of electroluminescence images of solar modules and cells to detect cracks
  • Analyzing time-series and geospatial data sets of solar installations
  • Developing open-source frameworks for machine learning composition-structure-property relationships in materials
  • Developing codes to analyze the crystal structures of inorganic compounds

Publications

To browse our publications, please visit Google Scholar or ResearchGate.

Team

Anubhav Jain

Group Lead

Zhuoying Zhu

Postdoctoral scholar
Materials Project

Duo Wang

Postdoctoral Scholar
Electrochemical water treatment

Nicholas Walker

Postdoctoral scholar
Natural language processing

Baojie Li

Postdoctoral scholar
Data mining of solar PV data sets

Rishi Kumar

Postdoctoral Scholar
Automated Laboratories

Hrushikesh Sahasrabuddhe

Graduate Student Researcher
Materials machine learning

Viktoriia Baibakova

Graduate Student Researcher
Natural Language Processing

Xin Chen

Graduate Student Researcher
Image analysis

Sanghoon Lee

Graduate Student Researcher
Natural Language Processing

Alexander Dunn

Graduate Student Researcher
High-throughput calculation & data mining

Alumni

Saurabh Bajaj

Postdoc
→Data Engineer, Citrine Informatics

 
 

Jason Frost

Undergraduate
→Synapse Energy Economics

 
 

Sayan Rowchowdhury

Undergraduate
→PhD candidate, Duke University

 
 

Michael Kim

Undergraduate
→(continuing studies)

 
 

Julien Brenneck

Undergraduate
→(continuing studies)

 
 

Nils Zimmermann

Postdoc
→(parent)

 
 

Ben Ellis

Postdoc
→Data Scientist, Sauce Labs

 
 

Hillary Pan

Undergraduate
→PhD candidate, Cornell University

 
 

Alireza Faghaninia

Postdoc
→Data Scientist, Credit Karma

 
 

Daniel Dopp

Undergraduate
→(continuing studies)

 
 

Peiyuan Yu

Postdoc
→Professor, SUSTech Shenzhen

 
 

Samy Cherfaoui

Undergraduate
→(continuing
studies)

 
 

Evan Spotte-Smith

Undergraduate
→PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley

 
 

Rees Chang

Undergraduate
→(continuing studies)

 
 

Qi Wang

Postdoc Affiliate
→Postdoc, Johns Hopkins

 
 

Leigh Weston

Postdoc
→Machine learning scientist, Medium

 
 

Avni Singhal

Undergraduate Researcher
→(continuing studies)

 
 

Matt Zhou

Undergraduate Researcher
→(continuing studies)

 
 

Arsineh Apelian

Undergraduate Researcher
→PhD candidate, UCSB

 
 

Todd Karin

Project Scientist
→Technical head, PVEL

 
 

Alex Ganose

Postdoctoral Scholar
→Professor, Imperial College London

 
 

Junsoo Park

Postdoctoral scholar
→Researcher, NASA Ames

 
 

Kevin Yang

Undergraduate Researcher
→(continuing studies)

 
 

Joining our group

There are currently no open positions available in the group.

Undergraduate students interested in working with us should apply through the SULI program and send us an email to let us know your interest. Application deadlines vary by term.

If you'd like to be notified of new openings, one option is to subscribe to our Twitter feed. Tweets about job openings begin with the word "Announcement" and are deleted once the position is filled.

If you're curious about what it is like to work in our group, you might consider reviewing our group handbook.

Explore what's new.

Publication Tweets

Read bite-sized paper summaries.

Open-source software

Clone/fork from our Github page.

Presentation slides

Review our presentation slides.

Blog

Read the HackingMaterials blog.