Max Gallant is a Ph.D. candidate in his fourth year at UC Berkeley in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He works in the research group of Professor Kristin A. Persson at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Prior to his Ph.D., Max studied Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Utah, where he earned his B.S., and worked at a materials informatics startup for several years before deciding to pursue a graduate degree.
In his doctoral studies, Max works on developing new computational methods for planning synthesis recipes for inorganic crystalline solids. This work aims to enable computational materials discovery workflows which propose theoretical candidate materials for a variety of applications but typically provide no guidance toward synthesizing and experimentally verifying those materials.
As a Kavli ENSI fellow, Max will focus on maturing a new method for identifying structural transition pathways in crystalline materials based on the crystal normal form, a novel crystal structure representation developed by Dr. David Mrdjenovich in the Persson group. Identifying the specific mechanisms by which crystal structures transform can elucidate synthesis pathways and produce new insights about elementary kinetic mechanisms in solid-state processes. This work will entail a mixture of software development, high-performance compute resource wrangling at NERSC, machine learning, and investigations of atomic movement in titanium dioxide. Max hopes that his work will yield a new and accessible method for identifying transition pathways in all kinds of crystalline systems.