Joshua Schrier

Biography

I received B.S. degrees in Chemistry and Biochemistry from St. Peter's College, in Jersey City, NJ in 2000, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California---Berkeley in 2005. My doctoral work was conducted under the guidance of K. Birgitta Whaley, and focused on the theory of magneto-optical, transport, and magnetic properties in nanocrystals and fullerenes, motivated by the desire to use these for quantum computing applications.

I was a Luis W. Alvarez postdoctoral fellow in computational sciences, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working under the guidance of Lin-Wang Wang. My research at LBL shifted to the use of high-performance parallel plane-wave pseudopotential density functional methods for the study of nanostructures. One goal of this work was to explore the interplay between strain and optical properties in nanostructures, and the second was to try to calculate properties of these types of materials relevant to photovoltaic applications. Since the mechanism of nanocrystal-based solar cells is quite different from traditional devices, there is actually quite a bit of basic physics/physical-chemistry research that is needed in this area.

I came to Haverford College in the Fall 2008 semester. So far, my teaching has been primarily in the physical chemistry sequence.

Courses: Fall 2008, Haverford

Courses: Spring 2009, Haverford