NSF Early Career Award

Professor Oiang Zhu has been honored by the NSF with a Faculty Early Career Development Program for his resarch in Organic Materials Discovery with the Aid of Digital Crystallography. This CAREER award will support theoretical and computational research and educational activities to advance the understanding of organic materials. Currently, systematic predictive models for developing new organic materials with targeted physical properties are largely missing, due to the fact that molecules can be packed in an enormous number of ways in the three dimensional space. In this five-years project, Zhu and his team will develop a new computational scheme that allows more efficient discovery of organic materials based on modern crystallography. In addition, this CAREER award also provides support for education and outreach activities that are centered on promoting open-source software development.