My research focuses on first-principles, computer-aided material design, discovery, and modeling to understand the fundamental origin of the complex behaviors in materials and use this information to make predictions to guide the experimental search for improved materials. Computer-aided simulation has the potential to mitigate the risk, cost, and time used in the experimental testing of potential materials. While we explore the whole periodic table searching for materials with exotic properties, we focus mainly on a special class of materials generally referred to as correlated materials including two-dimensional-based materials, heavy fermions, transition metal oxides, ferromagnetic semiconductors, manganites, Heusler-alloys, lanthanides, and actinides, etc. This class of materials shows a range of emergent and exotic properties not limited to topological states, quantum phase transitions, charge-density-wave, high-temperature superconductivity, spintronics, valleytronics, thermoelectricity, ferromagnetism, colossal magnetoresistance, and other correlated phenomena.
Chinedu Ekuma
Assistant Professor
2015: Louisiana State University, PhD Computational Condensed Matter Physics
2010: Southern University Baton Rouge LA, MSc Computational Condensed Matter Physics
2007: Ebonyi State University Nigeria, BSc (Highest honors) Industrial Physics
Explore this Profile×
Research Statement
Biography
Chinedu Ekuma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, Lehigh University. Before joining Lehigh, Dr. Ekuma was a George F. Adams Distinguished Research Scientist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, ALC, MD. He also held the National Research Council Research Fellow at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington D.C. from 2015 to 2017. He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from Louisiana State University in the group of Prof. Mark Jarrell. Dr. Ekuma’s research focuses on using materials informatics, machine learning, ab initio density functional theory, and many-body approaches to design and study materials with the goal (1) to discover new materials with useful technological applications; (2) to understand and control the interplay between the coexisting emerging functionalities; and (3) to explore how imperfection in materials affect these emerging properties.
- K.S. Kastuar, C.E. Ekuma, and Z.L. Liu, “Efficient prediction of temperature-dependent elastic and mechanical properties of 2D materials,” 2022, Scientific reports vol. 12 , pp, 1-8, doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-07819-8.
- Z.L. Liu, C.E. Ekuma, W.Q. Li, J.Q. Yang, and X.J. Li, “ElasTool: An automated toolkit for elastic constants calculation,” 2022, Computer Physics Communications vol. 270, pp, 108180, doi: 10.1016/j.cpc.2021.108180.
- K.O. Egbo et al., “Vacancy defects induced changes in the electronic and optical properties of NiO studied by spectroscopic ellipsometry and first-principles calculations,” 2020, Journal of Applied Physics, vol. 128, pp. 135705, doi: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0021650
- S. Khanmohammadi et al., "Engineering ultrafast carrier dynamics in GeS: nanostructuring and small molecule intercalation," 2022 47th International Conference on Infrared, Millimeter and Terahertz Waves (IRMMW-THz), 2022, pp. 1-2, doi: 10.1109/IRMMW-THz50927.2022.9895853.
- K.O. Egbo et al., “Effects of acceptor doping and oxygen stoichiometry on the properties of sputter-deposited p-type rocksalt NixZn1-xO (0.3≤ x≤ 1.0) alloys,” 2022, Journal of Alloys and Compounds, vol. 905, pp. 164224, doi: 10.1016/j.jallcom.2022.164224.
- K.M. Price et al., “Plasma-Enhanced Atomic Layer Deposition of HfO2 on Monolayer, Bilayer, and Trilayer MoS2 for the Integration of High-κ Dielectrics in Two-Dimensional Devices,”, 2019, ACS Applied Nano Materials, vol. 2, pp. 4085-4094. doi: 10.1021/acsanm.9b00505.