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April 2023

Archives for April 2023

Kevin Smith Featured by Berkeley Lab

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Graduate student Kevin Smith and Professor Janice Musfeldt were recently featured by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for their work with the Advanced Light Source (ALS). The highlight described the work in their paper entitled “Real-Space Infrared Spectroscopy of Ferroelectric Domain Walls in Multiferroic h-(Lu,Sc)FeO3” published in ACS Applied Matter Interfaces.

Smith and Musfeldt used infrared light from the ALS to investigate the properties of the domain walls that separate electrically polarized regions in a rare-earth ferrite material. Their findings open the door to broadband imaging of physical and chemical heterogeneity in ferroics, and improved understandings of the properties of flexible defect states. The complete highlight is available here. 

Chemistry Students Named Volunteers of Distinction

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Two undergraduate chemistry students are included in the 2023 Volunteer of Distinction Award winners. Drake Robins and Clay West were nominated by faculty members and joined the ranks of students from across the university being honored.

Drake Robins is a fourth-year senior studying analytical chemistry. He is a member of the Air Force ROTC and has been working in Associate Professor Bhavya Sharma’s lab since his junior year. After graduation, Robins will join the United States Air Force and attend Undergraduate Pilot Training. Robins expressed his gratitude for the award and his time at the University of Tennessee.

“Academics and research have always been a top priority for me throughout my time at UT, and I feel extremely blessed to be recognized for it this close to graduation,” said Robins.

Clay West, also a fourth-year senior, is a student in the department’s American Chemical Society certified bachelor’s degree program. He plans to spend the year after graduation applying to graduate schools and preparing to pursue a PhD in organic chemistry. West stated he was grateful to receive the Volunteer of Distinction Award and considers it to be a reflection of the work he has put into earning his degree.

The Volunteer of Distinction Awards were created in 2021 by the university to recognize students across campus who exhibit extraordinary academic achievement, professional promise, or excellence in research. Previous award winners from the chemistry department include Maggie Eslinger, Hannah Hagewood, Elijah Hix, Galvin McCarver, and Wilson Wang.

Jones Wins NVIDIA GPU Poster Award

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Grier Jones, fifth year chemistry PhD student, recently won a poster competition at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). His poster, entitled “Exploring the topology of electronic correlation with graph neural networks” earned the NVIDIA GPU Award for Best GPU Poster. The award targets excellent computational chemistry research using a graphical processing unit (GPU).

GPUs are most often associated with the high-quality images seen on gaming computers. However, the highly parallelized architecture of GPUs offers an acceleration platform that can outperform central processing units (CPUs) when processing large amounts of data in parallel. This has implications for scientific computing and machine learning applications, which have traditionally used CPUs.

Jones has developed a novel computational model that incorporates GPUs with graph neural networks (GNNs) and topological data analysis (TDA) to explore the topology of electron correlation. By incorporating two central motifs of the machine learning projects in the Vogiatzis lab, Data-Driven Quantum Chemistry (DDQC) and the application of persistent homology this study provides new perspectives on both the topological nature of electron correlation and the data-driven algorithms used to capture electron correlation.

For the purposes of this study, GPUs provided by the Infrastructure for Scientific Applications and Advanced Computing (ISAAC) cluster at the University of Tennessee were used. Training machine learning models on GPUs allows for the exploration of large datasets by reducing the computational time required to train the models. As a second step, persistent homology was used to characterize the transferability in the machine learning models between system size.

Jones expressed his gratitude to the Graduate Student Senate Travel Award and the Vogiatzis’ NSF-CAREER award for providing financial support for his participation in the ACS Spring 2023 National Meeting in Indianapolis. The award provides a professional workstation-level NVIDIA GPU, which Grier is excited to incorporate into his current and future projects.

The NVIDIA GPU Award for Best GPU Poster is a competitive biannual award sponsored by NVIDIA and the American Chemical Society’s Division of Computers in Chemistry.