Professor of Physics; Director of the Molecular Foundry and Senior Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Email: jbneaton@lbl.gov
Jeffrey B. Neaton is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, a Senior Faculty Scientist in the Materials Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a Member of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at Berkeley. His research interests are in the theory of materials and condensed matter, and in developing and applying ab initio theories and novel computational methods to predict, understand and control phase behavior and electronic phenomena in complex materials from first principles. He is experienced in running complex scientific organizations and programs, and is currently the Associate Laboratory Director for Energy Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, overseeing the Chemical Sciences and Materials Sciences Divisions, as well as Berkeley Lab's two Basic Energy Sciences-sponsored national scientific User Facilities, the Advanced Light Source and the Molecular Foundry. He served as the Director of the Molecular Foundry from 2013-2019. He is also the Associate Director of the Center for Computational Study of Excited-State Phenomena in Energy Materials at Berkeley Lab. He received his PhD in physics in 2000 under Neil Ashcroft from Cornell University, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University with Karin Rabe, David Vanderbilt, and David Langreth from 2000-2003. After having worked as a postdoc under Steven Louie at Berkeley from 2003-2005 and later as a staff scientist at the Molecular Foundry from 2006-2012. Neaton is a recipient of a DOE Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists in 2009 and Engineers award and was named a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013. He serves on numerous international advisory boards, and from 2012-2018, he served as Division Associate Editor for Physical Review Letters. Most recently, he received the NERSC High Impact Scientific Achievement Award in 2017 and he was the 2018 Pariser-Parr Distinguished Lecturer in Chemistry at the University of North Carolina. The author of more than 280 publications, he was named an American Physical Society Outstanding Referee in 2023, and is an ISI Highly-Cited Researcher.