News
August 16, 2025 - Brianna completes her summer internship working in the Quantum Simulations Group at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
August 12 - 14 , 2025 - Aurora, Lei, Brianna, and Anthony attend and present at the CfHEDS meeting held at the University of California Livermore Collaboration Center and UC Merced.
July 27 - August 1, 2025 - Lei and Sage attend the Strongly Coupled Coulomb Systems 2025 meeting at Lake Tahoe. Lei presented a talk titled, “Study of early-stage carbon plasma formation from laser-irradiated graphene and diamond via ab initio calculations and kinetic plasma simulations.” Sage presented a poster titled, “Correlation strength in the strictly correlated limit via a two-legged adiabatic connection.”
June 15 - 28, 2025 - Sage attends the Los Alamos Computational Condensed Matter Summer School at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
June 20, 2025 - Vince successfully defends his dissertation and earns his Ph.D.! Congratulations Dr. Martinetto!
June 8 - 11, 2025 - Aurora and Bridget attend the Electronic Structure Workshop in El Paso, Texas. Bridget presented a poster on physics-informed neural operator inversions in density functional theory.
May 30, 2025- Congratulations to Dr. Brittany Harding on successfully defending her dissertation and earning her Ph.D.!
April 18, 2025 - Anthony gives a seminar at Sorbonne University in Paris, France hosted by Dr. Mandy Bethkenhagen, where he presented his talk “Inversions in density functional theory: simple systems towards thermalized densities.”
April 7 - 17, 2025 - Anthony attends the 10th Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory: Prospects and Applications school and workshop in Benasque, Spain. He shared his research by presenting a poster on inversions in DFT and their applications to thermal systems.
March 11, 2025- Bridget presents a poster at UC Merced’s Research Week Poster Showcase. Her poster focused on physics-informed neural operator inversions in density functional theory.
March 10, 2025- Brianna presents a talk during UC Merced’s Stardust to Sentience: R1esearch Symposium. Her talk focused on how to improve computational simulations of warm dense matter, by improving approximations for the free energy exchange-correlation functional.
March 2025- PJ group to attend 2025 APS Global Physics Summit!
Aurora: Decorrelation and exchange-correlation entropies in thermal ensembles
Lei: Insights of plasma formation from laser-irradiated carbon targets via ab initio calculations
Brittany: Finite-temperature generalized Kohn-Sham theory
Brianna: Approximate adiabatic connection from the exchange-correlation entropy for the uniform electron gas
Anthony: Application of the Zhao-Morrison-Parr Inversion Method to Thermalized Systems
Sage: Assessing the suitability of temperature-dependent coefficients in zero-temperature models for the strong interaction limit
Jose: Electron localization analysis for a macroscopic property indicator in the disordered FCC solid solution of compositionally complex alloys
June 12, 2024- The PJ group welcomes summer undergraduate Alma Mora to the group. This summer she will be working on generating densities of small biochemical molecules to be used in inversions. Welcome Alma!
May 9, 2024- Congratulations to Vince who received the Departmental Fellowship Award and Brittany who received the Graduate Research Excellence Award at the CBC Awards Ceremony!
May 5, 2024- Aurora, Vince, Brittany, and Sage present their work at the West Coast Theoretical Chemistry Conference (WCTC) at UC Merced.
April 17, 2024- Brittany, Zach, and Vera’s paper, “Exchange–correlation entropy from the generalized thermal adiabatic connection” is published in JCP!
April 4, 2024- Estefania is awarded an Honorable Mention for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Congratulations!
April 3, 2024- Aurora, pictured alongside fellow speakers Dr. Anna Quider and Dr. Alexandra Bordisso, attends the APS April Meeting in Sacramento, CA. At the meeting, Aurora presented on the development of high energy density science research at UC Merced.
March 19, 2024- Vincent’s paper, “Inverting the Kohn-Sham equations with physics-informed machine learning,” is published in Machine Learning: Science & Technology. This work was done in collaboration with Dr. Attila Cangi and Karan Shah from the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS). The paper can be found here. Congrats Vince!
March 19, 2024- Brittany and Brianna present their work at the ACS COMP poster session in New Orleans, LA.
March 12, 2024- The PJ group welcomes a new postdoc, Dr. Lei Chen. He will be working jointly with Prof. Venkatt Ayyaswamy and Prof. David Strubbe. Welcome Lei!
March 6, 2024- The PJ group goes out for dinner while at APS!
March 4, 2024 - Aurora, Brittany, Vince, and Brianna present their work at the APS March Meeting in Minneapolis, MN.
March 2024 - PJ group to attend APS March Meeting 2024: Aurora, adiabatic connections for exact and approximate thermal density functional theory; Brittany, generalized thermal adiabatic connection and exchange-correlation free energy approximations; Vincent, upside-down adiabatic connection and asymmetric Hubbard dimer; Brianna, spin symmetry breaking and constrained SCF.
December 19, 2023 - Jose and Alejandro join the PJ group. Welcome!
December 16, 2023 - Jared graduates from UCM with his B.S. in Chemistry and a Biochemistry emphasis. Congratulations!
September 28-29, 2023 - The CfHEDS team gathered for two days of presentations and discussions on collaborations in research, education, and training at the newly opened University of California Livermore Collaboration Center.
June 29 - July 8, 2023 - Brittany and Brianna attend the TDDFT School & Workshop at Rutgers University-Newark.
June 13 - 16, 2023 - UC Merced hosts the 35th Electronic Structure Workshop. Check out the news story here!
March 29, 2023 - Brianna receives an NSF GRFP award . Check out the news story here.
March 6, 2023 - Burke APS reunion at Able Baker Brewery in Las Vegas.
