Team

The Team

Our theory team is formed by:

• Nicolaie-Bogdan Cernov-Vivirschi, who will start a PhD in October 2024 to work on mesoscopic simulations of ferroelectrics in presence of free charges.

• Iñigo Robredo, who will join us as a postdoc in September 2024 to investigate the mechanisms controlling ferroelectric switching in nanostructures.

• Krishna Patel, a PhD student since June 2024. Krishna studies electric quasiparticles for unconventional computing.

• Sheriff Naziru Abdulmutalib, a PhD student since September 2023. Sheriff studies water splitting on the surface of ferroelectric materials.

• Mauro Pulzone, a PhD student since September 2022. Mauro develops effective approaches to simulate dynamical properties of ferroelectrics.

• Binayak Mukherjee, a postdoc since June 2022. Binayak works on nanostructured hafnia-based ferroelectrics.

• Natalya S. Fedorova, a postdoc since October 2020. Currently, Natalya's main focus is on understanding and optimizing pyroelectric energy harvesting using ferroelectrics.

• Hugo Aramberri, since January 2022 a permanent researcher at LIST, my closest collaborator on everything theory and simulation.

• Jorge Íñiguez-González, who started this pursuit in 2005 at the ICMAB-CSIC (Spain), and moved to LIST in 2015.

We are part of a larger LIST group working on functional oxides and ferroic materials. The other permanent members of the group are:

• Emmanuel Defay (group leader)

• Stéphanie Girod

• Sebastjan Glinsek

• Torsten Granzow

• Veronika Kovacova

Last but not least, we are also part of an Inter-institutional Research Group with the ferroics team at the University of Luxembourg, which is formed by:

• Mael Guennou

• Jens Kreisel

Former mentees

I am sometimes asked about the careers of former PhD students and postdocs. Here is a rather complete list of people I have supervised over the years, in reverse chronological order, providing a description of their later activities with varying degrees of concreteness. Please let me know about omissions or inaccuracies.

• Diana Elisa Murillo Navarro got her PhD from the University of Luxembourg in October 2023. She is currently taking some time to ponder her career opportunities.

• John Mangeri left our group to work as a postdoc at the Technical University of Denmark.

• Sangita Dutta got her PhD from the University of Luxembourg in June 2022. She left our group to work as a postdoc at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden).

• Mónica Graf left our group to work as a postdoc at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

• Hugo Aramberri never left our group... because he was promoted to a position as permanent scientist at LIST (Luxembourg).

• Alireza Sasani got his PhD from the Universtiy of Liège (Belgium) in December 2021. (Thesis co-supervised with Eric Bousquet.) After his PhD he stayed in Liège to work as a postdoc.

• Mauro A.P. Gonçalves got his PhD from the University of Luxembourg and the Universidad de Cantabria (Spain) in July 2020. (Thesis co-supervised with Javier Junquera.) He left our group to work as a postdoc at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

• Juan Antonio Seijas-Bellido got his PhD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) in October 2019. (Thesis co-supervised with Riccardo Rurali.) He left our group to work as a postdoc at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain). He later realized teaching was his calling, and got a permanent position in a high school in Seville.

• Javier Alanis got his PhD from the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Mexico) in June 2019. (Thesis co-supervised with María Eugenia Mendoza.) After his PhD he moved to work as a postdoc at the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí (Mexico).

• Carlos Escorihuela-Sayalero got his PhD from the University of Luxembourg in April 2019. He left our group to work as a postdoc at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain). He eventually joined IDEADED -- a new semiconductors company near Barcelona -- to run R&D projects as a computational physicist.

• Peng Chen left our group to work as a postdoc at the Italian Institute of Technology (Italy). He eventually became a professor at the Guangdong Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology, in Shantou (China).

• Hong Jian Zhao left our group to work as a postdoc at the University of Arkansas (USA). He later became a professor at Jilin University (China).

• Jacek C. Wojdeł left our group to work as a "Profesional Cloud Wrestler" in various technological start-ups in the Barcelona area (Spain). Jacek came up with the term "second principles"... and with the first code implementing them! (SPLD = "Second-Principles Lattice Dynamics")

• Mathias P. Ljungberg left our group to work as a postdoc at the Donostia International Physics Center (Spain). He later became a consultant and software developer at Savantic AB (Sweden).

• Otto Emiliano González-Vázquez got his PhD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) in July 2012. He left our group to work as a postdoc at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (Trieste, Italy). He later became a computer scientist at the Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste.

• Zeila Zanolli left our group to work as a postdoc at the University of Liège (Belgium). She later became a professor at Utrecht University (The Netherlands).

• Roberta Poloni left our group to work as a postdoc at the Molecular Foundry (Berkeley Lab, USA). She later became a CNRS scientist at SIMaP Grenoble (France).

• Manuel Cobian left our group to work as a postdoc at the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (France). He later became a professor at École Centrale Lyon.

Collaborators

I have been fortunate to work with many superb scientists over the years. A non-exhaustive, seldom-updated, yet-representative list of collaborators includes:

• Laurent Bellaiche (University of Arkansas)

• Eric Bousquet (Université de Liège)

• Nicholas Bristowe (Durham University)

• Enric Canadell (Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona, ICMAB-CSIC)

• Andrés Cano (Institut Néel)

• Claudio Cazorla (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)

• Oswaldo Diéguez (Tel Aviv University)

• Brahim Dkhil (CentraleSupélec)

• Alessio Filippetti (Università degli Studi di Cagliari)

• Vincenzo Fiorentini (Università degli Studi di Cagliari)

• Pablo García-Fernández (Universidad de Cantabria)

• Philippe Ghosez (Université de Liège)

• Marta Gibert (TU Wien)

• Alexei Gruverman (University of Nebraska)

• Javier Junquera (Universidad de Cantabria)

• Igor Luk'yanchuk (Université de Picardy)

• Maria Eugenia Mendoza (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla)

• Joaquim Agostinho Moreira (Universidade do Porto)

• Guillaume F. Nataf (GREMAN, CNRS / Université de Tours)

• Dmitri E. Nikonov (Kepler Computing)

• Beatriz Noheda (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)

• Charles Paillard (University of Arkansas)

• Ramamoorthy Ramesh (Rice University)

• Riccardo Rurali (Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona, ICMAB-CSIC)

• Jacobo Santamaría (Universidad Complutense)

• Massimiliano Stengel (ICREA & ICMAB-CSIC)

• Jean-Marc Triscone (Université de Gèneve)

• Hongjun Xiang (Fudan University)

• Yurong Yang (Nanjing University)

• Pavlo Zubko (University College London)