Sahar Sharifzadeh, Institute Junior Faculty Fellow, To Give Feb 8, 2017 Meet Our Fellows Talk

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM on Wednesday, February 8, 2017
Refreshments & networking at 2:45 PM
Hariri Institute for Computing
111 Cummington Mall, Room 180

Last fall, the Hariri Institute for Computing launched a redesigned “Meet Our Fellows” series that will showcase the Institute’s 2016 Junior Faculty Fellows as well as the inaugural cohort of Hariri Graduate Student Fellows. Prior to Junior Faculty Fellow presentations, a Graduate Student Fellow will give a 5-minute preview of his or her current research.

Meet Our Fellows/Research Preview:
Jonathan Hersh
Hariri Graduate Fellow, Hariri Institute for Computing
PhD candidate, Economics (CAS)
“Poverty from Space: Using High Resolution Satellite Imagery for Estimating Economic Well-being and Geographic Targeting”
Jonathan is an applied economist who applies machine learning and data science methods to open questions in economics. These methods are used both to generate new sources of data and as a complement to econometric methods. His current research interests include measuring economic well-being using machine vision algorithms applied to high resolution satellite images and applications of deep learning for prediction.

Meet Our Fellows/Junior Faculty Fellow Presentation:
Large-Scale Computation for Materials Science

Sahar Sharifzadeh
Junior Faculty Fellow, Hariri Institute for Computing
Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering (ENG)

Abstract: For the development of next-generation technologies, there is a need within the materials science community to design materials with specific functionality. To this end, computational approaches can provide powerful tools to develop physically-motivated material design rules and avoid costly trial-and-error approaches to synthesis. Here, I will present first-principles computational studies of solid-state materials with the goal of understanding their optoelectronic properties and tailoring these properties for solar energy conversion. I will provide an overview of the computational methods, which are based on density functional theory (DFT), and their use on scientific computing resources such as the BU’s SCC. Then, I will provide examples for two promising classes of materials, organic solids and two-dimensional systems. For both systems, highly accurate calculations provide new physical insight that is a necessary first step for material design.

Bio: Sahar Sharifzadeh was selected as an Institute Junior Faculty Fellow in fall 2016. She joined Boston University in fall 2014 as an assistant professor of electrical & computer engineering and materials science & engineering. Her research interests involve understanding and predicting the electronic properties of material using first-principles electronic structure theories. Professor Sharifzadeh obtained her B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from University of California, Berkeley in 2003 and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 2009. She then joined the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as a postdoctoral fellow, and subsequently as a project scientist. Professor Sharifzadeh is also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Physics at Boston University.