Bio

Professor Douglas L. Irving is the Director of Graduate Programs, a University Faculty Scholar, and an Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor. He received his Bachelor of Science in Physics from Furman University in 1997 and his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from the University of Florida in 2004. He carried out postdoctoral research at North Carolina State University in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering before joining the faculty in 2008. He is on the Editorial Board of the Elsevier journal Computational Materials Science. Irving has received the National Science Foundation CAREER award, been recognized as an Outstanding Young Alumni from UF, and was named an NC State University Faculty Scholar. Irving is a decorated teacher winning the Outstanding Teaching Award and being named an Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor. Irving’s research centers on predicting electrical and optical properties of wide bandgap semiconductors and dielectrics with applications in power electronics, light emitters, and quantum applications. His group utilizes first principles methods and has pioneered the development of point defeat informatics, point defect equilibrium simulation, and the use of AI tools in the inverse design of materials.

Publications

• Investigative study of Mg in GaN and AlN with density functional theory , Applied Physics Letters (2026)
• Assessing properties of Al and Ga dopants in ZnSe , The Journal of Chemical Physics (2025)
• Qubit properties of antisite defects in ZnSe , Applied Physics Letters (2025)
• Defect Chemistry of Halogen Dopants in ZnSe , The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (2022)
• Inverse Materials Design of Doping Strategies with AI, Thermodynamics, and Density Functional Theory , JOM (2022)
• On native point defects in ZnSe , Applied Physics Letters (2022)
• Oxygen Vacancy-Induced Anomalous Hall Effect in a Nominally Non-magnetic Oxide , Journal of Electronic Materials (2022)
• Computational approaches to point defect simulations for semiconductor solid solution alloys , The Journal of Chemical Physics (2021)
• Fermi level pinning in Co‐doped BaTiO ₃ : Part I. DC and AC electrical conductivities and degradation behavior , Journal of the American Ceramic Society (2021)
• Fermi level pinning in Co‐doped BaTiO ₃ : Part II. Defect chemistry models , Journal of the American Ceramic Society (2021)