Craig Fennie receives NSF Career award

Ten Cornell faculty members are recent recipients of National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Awards, which support early-career development activities of teacher-scholars. All awardees also engage in education and outreach activities as part of their grant fulfillments.

Craig Fennie, assistant professor of applied and engineering physics, has received $400,000 over five years for using theory to discover and design new dielectric and magnetic phenomena and their materials realizations. His approach involves a combination of microscopic models of the solid state, basic principles of crystal chemistry, and first-principles simulations. Due to their highly tunable characteristics, structurally and chemically complex oxide materials containing transition metals elements, such as multiferroic oxides, are promising classes of materials to explore. Fennie's project will focus on artificially structured materials in which an atomic-scale interface is key in determining macroscopic properties.

After receiving his doctoral degree in physics from Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey in 2006, Fennie spent two years at The Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne Nationial Laboratory as the Nicholas Metropolis Fellow. He joined the Cornell faculty in July of 2008 and works in the broad area of computational/theoretical materials physics including Materials-by-Design. In 2010 he received a Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office and in 2011 he received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.