Seminar Speaker: Malik Wagih, LLNL

Materials Discovery and Design through Defect Engineering

Abstract

Today, the unprecedented demand for novel high-performance materials with extreme properties underscores the urgent need for innovations in materials screening and discovery efforts. Over the past decade, this has spurred multiple initiatives to empower data-driven materials design, leveraging high-throughput computation to create extensive databases for properties of perfect crystalline solids. Defects—imperfections in the crystalline lattice—significantly influence the structural and functional properties of the material, and thus offer an additional powerful pathway for materials discovery and design. Yet, defect studies have been mostly limited to trial-and-error approaches, and our understanding of the structure-chemistry-property connections remains limited. The complex nature of defects and their interactions presents significant challenges. In this talk, I will draw on my work on grain boundary chemistry design for nanocrystalline structural materials to show how the integration of theory, high-throughput computation, machine learning, and targeted experimentation can tackle these challenges and advance defect engineering as a platform for accelerating material discovery and design.

Biography

Malik Wagih is a Lawrence Fellow in the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate. He earned his Ph.D. and S.M. degrees in Nuclear Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the British University in Egypt. Before joining LLNL, he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.