Research Associate in Materials Informatics

Location: South Kensington campus

Contract: Full-Time, Fixed Term contract for 2 years

Job Summary

We are looking for two Research Associates to join the research group of Prof. Aron Walsh (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/a.walsh) in the Department of Materials and Thomas Young Centre at Imperial College London.

The project concerns the development and deployment of data-driven approaches for materials chemistry and physics. The topics of interest include:

• Feature engineering for composition-structure-property maps
• Generative models for the inverse design of crystals
• Machine learning forcefields to describe heat and charge transport in solids

The work will build on our group package SMACT (https://github.com/WMD group/SMACT) and link with other open-source developments such as PYMATGEN and ASE. The target areas include clean energy conversion and storage, with a focus on semiconducting and mixed ionic-electronic conducting materials for photovoltaic and photoelectrochemical systems. This includes both inorganic crystals and metal-organic frameworks. Your cover letter should state your specific area of interest.

Duties and responsibilities

You will be responsible for contributing to a high-quality research programme involving a range of materials modelling techniques. These include aspects of computer programming, high-performance computing on the national supercomputer ARCHER2, first-principles methods such as density functional theory, and machine learning methods such as crystal graph convolutional neural networks.

Essential requirements

You will have completed a PhD (or equivalent) in theoretical or computational physical science (chemistry, physics or materials). You will have a strong research track record in the field, and will be able to demonstrate an ability to understand and perform first-principles density functional theory calculations for solids, and train and evaluate machine learning models.

Further information

*Candidates who have not yet officially been awarded their PhD will be appointed initially at Research Associate (with a salary range of £38,194 to £41,388).

Further information about the role can be obtained from Professor Aron Walsh (a.walsh@imperial.ac.uk).

Any queries regarding the application process should be directed to: Mrs Darakshan Khan (d.khan@imperial.ac.uk).

For technical issues when applying online, please contact: support.jobs@imperial.ac.uk

The College is a proud signatory to the San-Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which means that in hiring and promotion decisions, we evaluate applicants on the quality of their work, not the journal impact factor where it is published. For more information, see https://www.imperial.ac.uk/research-and innovation/about-imperial-research/research-evaluation/

The College believes that the use of animals in research is vital to improve human and animal health and welfare. Animals may only be used in research programmes where their use is shown to be necessary for developing new treatments and making medical advances. Imperial is committed to ensuring that, in cases where this research is deemed essential, all animals in the College’s care are treated with full respect, and that all staff involved with this work show due consideration at every level. http://www.imperial.ac.uk/research-and-innovation/about-imperial-research/research integrity/animal-research/

We are committed to equality of opportunity, to eliminating discrimination and to creating an inclusive working environment for all. We therefore encourage candidates to apply irrespective of age, disability, marriage or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion and belief, gender identity, sex, or sexual orientation. We are an Athena SWAN Silver Award winner, a Disability Confident Leader and a Stonewall Diversity Champion.

Closing date: 26 April 2023

To apply, visit www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs and search by the job reference

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