Page 10 - CEMS News Winter 2023

FACULTY NEWS
Faculty promotions & research updates
With recent promotions, faculty members offer insights into their research.
Effective Fall semester 2022, Turan Birol was promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure, while Benjamin Hackel, Bharat Jalan, and Nathan Mara were promoted to the rank of professor. They share their research updates below.
The abstract solid state problems they are working on includes the properties of the so-called charge density wave (CDW) materials, including two-dimensional transition metal chalcogenides, where the interplay of
the quantum mechanical properties of electrons with the atomic positions give rise to interesting thermodynamic phase transitions. An open problem in this area is the transition between an incommensurate phase, where atoms’ positions are modulated with an irrational wavelength, and a commensurate phase, where the wavelength is an integer multiple of the lattice parameter. While questions about this transition have been around for decades, there have been some recent developments in both the experimental capabilities and group theoretical tools that make this an exciting time to address this problem.
Turan Birol
Turan Birol
A materials theorist, Birol’s group uses first-principle computational approaches
to reproduce, explain, and predict properties of crystalline materials. In addition to various computational methods including Density Functional Theory, their toolbox also includes a number of analytical approaches to help them address various problems
in crystalline materials. In particular, Birol’s group are experts on applications of
Benjamin Hackel
Research in the Hackel lab aims to understand and control how biomolecules interact with their physiological environments. The team’s work on protein engineering advances fundamental comprehension of protein sequence-function relationships and develops technological platforms to empower efficient engineering of novel and improved
group and representation theories to electronic and crystal structural properties.
Birol’s research spans a wide range of applied, as
well as more abstract, problems. On the applied side, they spent a significant amount of effort to identify a means of bringing together optical transparency and
high electrical conductivity in a material and design an optically transparent metal. In the near future, they are planning to expand these materials design efforts to nonreciprocal optical effects as well. In nonreciprocal materials, light traveling in opposite directions is affected in different ways, which makes these materials useful for various photonic and telecommunication applications. For completely different types of applications, they have also been working on finding novel catalysts, the catalytic properties of which can be practically manipulated by tuning the atomic and electronic structure.
Benjamin Hackel
10 www.cems.umn.edu
protein performance.
These innovations are applied to create molecularly targeted therapeutics and diagnostics to address pressing challenges in oncology, inflammation, and infectious disease. The Hackel lab collaborates within the department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science as well as Biomedical Engineering, Medicine, Pharmacology, Medicinal Chemistry, and others. Hackel
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