Short Bio

Dr. Maciej Haranczyk received a PhD degree in Chemistry from University of Gdansk in Poland in 2008. During his graduate studies, he received numerous research fellowships to collaborate with researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (M. Gutowski), University of Southern California (A. Warshel), University of Sheffield (P. Willett, J. Holliday), and others. After his graduate school, he moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which had offered him a prestigious Glenn T. Seaborg Postdoctoral Fellowship. He was then hired into a tenured Research Scientist position (2010) and subsequently promoted to a Staff Scientist position (2014). He joined IMDEA Materials Institute as a Senior Researcher in Summer 2015. His aim is to establish a new research line focused on information-driven materials discovery.

His research activities are in the area of computational and data-driven materials discovery and design. His work effectively combines novel materials informatics approaches with traditional computational material science techniques such electronic structure calculations and/or molecular simulations. Moreover, his work often requires leveraging on the recent developments in applied mathematics and computer science. For example, computational geometry methods can be used to derive material descriptors used in materials similarity and/or screening whereas parallel Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) can be programed to perform high-throughput molecular simulations. The spectrum of applications actively investigated by Dr. Haranczyk is broad. It involves discovery of porous materials for energy applications (CO2 capture, methane storage),  design of ionic liquids, characterization of nanoparticles and others.