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Brief Bio Dr. Phani Motamarri is currently assistant research scientist (research faculty) in the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. Motamarri received his PhD from the same department working under Prof Vikram Gavini in the broad area of computational materials physics. During his PhD, he was the recipient of Rackham pre-doctoral fellowship and 2014 Robert J Melosh medal for the best student paper in finite-element methods. Motamarri's primary research interests lie in the broad scope of computational modeling of materials with focus on computational nano-science leading to applications in the areas of mechanics of materials and energy. His research is strongly multidisciplinary, drawing ideas from applied mathematics, data science, quantum-mechanics, solid mechanics, materials science and scientific computing.
Research focus Dr Motamarri's research focus lies in developing systematically improvable real-space computational methodologies and associated mathematical techniques for conducting large-scale electronic structure calculations using density functional theory (DFT). Massively parallel and scalable numerical algorithms using finite-elements (DFT-FE) are developed as a part of this research effort, which enabled large-scale DFT calculations on tens of thousands of electrons for the first time using finite-element basis. These computational methods will aid fundamental studies on defects in materials, molecular and nanoscale systems which otherwise would have been difficult to study with the existing state of the art computational methods. Current areas of application include -- (a) first-principles modelling of energetics of point defects and dislocations in Al, Mg and its alloys which are popular in light-weighting applications to provide useful inputs to meso-scale and continuum models, (b) Understanding various aspects of material behavior in 2D materials (MoS2, WS2) .
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