Graduate Student Seminar

January 24, 2025

10:00 a.m. ET

McConomy Auditorium, First Floor Cohon University Center

Discovering Compounds and Designing Materials

In the literature, extended crystalline compounds are sometimes inaccurately labeled materials, but materials are usually compounds that display some useful functionality. Moreover, real materials, when employed in real-world applications, are rarely pure compounds. It is also of historical interest to note that the synthesis of chemical compounds often predates the discovery of the key functionality that would allow the compound to be declared a material, sometimes by decades. It is more often the case therefore, that compounds that have been previously synthesized are screened for their function. I will discuss approaches to the synthesis of new compounds (using examples of halide perovskites and double perovskites), and how computational tools aid in screening these compounds for useful functionality (using magnetocalorics and low-k dielectrics as examples). It turns out to be rarely the case that functional materials are made by design, but we will discuss some recent examples where the gap between compound discovery and functionality discovery have narrowed.

Ram seshadr

Ram Seshadri 
Fred and Linda R. Wudl Professor of Materials Science
Distinguished Professor, Materials Department, and Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
Associate Dean for Research in the College of Engineering
Director, Materials Research Laboratory
University of California, Santa Barbara

Ram Seshadri received his Ph.D. in Solid State Chemistry in 1995 from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, working with Professor C. N. R. Rao FRS. After some years as a postdoctoral fellow in France and Germany, he returned to IISc as an Assistant Professor in 1999. He moved to the Materials Department in the College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara in 2002. In 2020, he was promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor in the Materials Department and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He is also the Fred and Linda R. Wudl Professor of Materials Science, and the Director of the Materials Research Laboratory: A National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. He has also recently taken on the role of Associate Dean for Research in the College of Engineering. His work –– embodied in over 430 journal publications –– broadly addresses the topic of structure–composition–property relations in functional, crystalline inorganic and hybrid materials. Ram is the Editor of Annual Reviews of Materials Research and is an Executive Editor of Chemistry of Materials.

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