About: My research is in the area of Computational Materials Engineering--my group is using computer simulation to study the properties of semiconductor nanostructures, such as nanoscale FET transistors, graphene nanoribbons, superlattices, and nanowires, from first principles. We merge theory and computational science to explore physics at the nanoscale using computational tools ranging from Density Functional Theory bandstructure and dispersion calculations, to solving the coupled electron and phonon Boltzmann transport equations with the Monte Carlo method. We are particularly interested in the impact of dimension and boundaries on heat and charge transfer, with applications in thermoelectric energy conversion.

Bio: Zlatan Aksamija received his B.S. in Computer Engineering (Summa Cum Laude, James Honors Scholar, Mathematics Minor) in 2003, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (with Computational Science and Engineering option) in 2005 and 2009, respectively, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. His dissertation on “Thermal effects in semiconductor materials and devices” was supported by a DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (2005-2009). Zlatan was awarded an Outstanding Paper award at the EIT’07 conference and a Greg Stillman Memorial semiconductor graduate research award in 2008. From 2009 to 2013, Zlatan was a Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow and an NSF CI TraCS Fellow in the ECE department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focused on semiconductor nanostructures for thermoelectric energy conversion applications, as well as numerical methods for the simulation of electronic and thermal transport in nanostructures. In 2013, Zlatan became an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and founded NET (NanoEnergy & Thermophysics) lab, where he studies nanoscale dissipation and heat transfer in 2-dimensional materials, alloys, and nanocomposites. He received the Best Paper award from IEEE Nano (2014) and a Lilly Teaching Fellowship from the UMass Institute for Teaching and Faculty Development.