Understanding the optical and electronic properties of materials is the foundation of many of the world's technologies including computers, solar cells, batteries, and many more. In order to continue making advances in the development of these technologies, researchers are searching for new materials to improve their performance. My research focuses on discovering new, electronically useful materials with theory and numerical calculations, which is a faster and more efficient discovery process than synthesizing materials in the laboratory.

The challenge to such computational materials discovery is that the relevant material properties are determined by the behavior of electrons, and electrons all repel each other and move in a correlated way. This correlation makes the electronic problem a very difficult one to solve. Independent particle methods in physics, such as density functional theory, treat electronic correlation in an approximate way and work well for weakly-correlated materials. However, for strongly-correlated materials, a more accurate and rigorous treatment of correlation is needed.

My research focuses on merging aspects of different methods in condensed matter physics into a new theory for strongly-correlated electrons. By combining elements of quantum chemistry, electronic structure theory, and quantum many-body physics, I am developing a new theory to predict ground and excited states of materials at a lower cost than traditional approaches. My work is balanced between theoretical developments and large-scale numerical calculations on supercomputing clusters.