Keivan Esfarjani

About

I am presently pursuing my research interests in the fields of energy management and high-temperature materials. I develop computer codes and novel methodologies to perform and analyze results from these specific calculations. More specifically, I study behavior of anharmonic materials at high temperatures, and under non-equilibrium conditions, focusing on their stability, defects, electronic, optical and thermal transport properties. During the past decade, I concentrated my research on modeling electron and phonon transport in a variety of materials, especially thermoelectrics, which are used to convert heat to electricity. Our work on electron cloaking, first principles calculations of thermal conductivity and mean free paths distribution, observation of coherent phonons in superlattices, explanation of phonon softening and low thermal conductivity in PbTe and other IV-VI materials, unification of conduction and radiation in the near-field regime, and phonon hydrodynamics in graphene and 2D materials have attracted much attention from the scientific community and highlighted in news. Earlier on, I studied stability of clusters, fullerenes and looked at mechanicaland transport properties of carbon nanotubes. We proposed for the first time a nano-diode made of n-p doped carbon nanotubes. With 2 colleagues we authored a book called "Computational materials science from ab into to Monte Carlo" published by Springer in 1998 (1st Edition) and then 2018 (2nd Edition).

Bio:

Keivan Esfarjani is a theoretical and computational materials scientist. His undergraduate studies up to the Masters level were done in France, at the Ecole Centrale de Paris where he studied all fields of engineering, and at the University of Paris VII where he specialized in solid-state physics. His PhD was in condensed matter theory, on screening properties of the 2D electron gas, followed by the melting of the 2D electron solid (the Wigner crystal) in the quantum regime via generation of dislocations. His research has covered non-linear lattice dynamics, density functional theory methods, and modeling of electronic properties and transport of charge and heat in nanoscale systems. He has pioneered a method to compute phonon lifetimes and thermal conductivity of solids from density functional calculation of force constants. His recent work has been to include anharmonicity via the self-consistent phonon theory in the thermodynamic and transport formalism at high temperatures. He has held appointments as assistant and then associate professorship at the Institute for Materials Research of the Tohoku University in Japan, where his research focused on understanding and modeling properties of carbon-based materials and clusters, using first-principles methods. This was followed by appointments at the Sharif University, UC Santa Cruz, MIT, and Rutgers University before finally landing at the University of Virginia.

Education

General Engineering, ​Ecole Centrale de Paris, 1986

M.S. University of Paris VII, 1987

Ph.D. ​University of Delaware, 1991