Lab Partnering Service Discovery

Professor of Chemistry, received his B.S. in 1997 from Pennsylvania State University, where he worked in the group of Prof. Ayusman Sen on palladium-catalyzed co- and terpolymerizations. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 under the guidance of Prof. T. Don Tilley, primarily focused on the development of new catalytic C–H bond functionalizations. Following postdoctoral work at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) with Antonio Togni investigating catalytic asymmetric hydroamination and hydrophosphination, Aaron joined the chemistry faculty at Iowa State University in 2005. He was promoted to associate professor in 2011, and to professor in 2016.

Kristin Persson is director of Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry. The Molecular Foundry, a Nanoscale Science Research Center national user facility, serves over 1,000 academic, industrial, and government scientists annually from all over the world through its user program. The user program grants researchers access to unique, state-of-the-art instrumentation, and affords the opportunity to collaborate with Molecular Foundry scientists with expertise across a broad range of disciplines.

In addition, Persson is a senior faculty scientist in the Energy Storage & Distributed Resources Division within the Energy Technologies Area. The Persson Group studies the physics and chemistry of materials using atomistic computational methods and high-performance computing technology, particularly for clean energy production and storage applications.

Professor Persson directs the Materials Project which is a multi-institution, multi-national effort to compute the properties of all inorganic materials and provide the data and associated analysis algorithms to researchers free of charge. The ultimate goal of the initiative is to drastically reduce the time needed to invent new materials by focusing costly and time-consuming experiments on compounds that show the most promise computationally. 

James Morris became Ames Laboratory’s Chief Research Officer in June 2019. As Chief Research Officer (CRO), Morris is responsible for initiating, developing and supervising the Ames Laboratory’s scientific divisions, institutes and programs. The CRO formulates and evaluates new initiatives in support of Ames Laboratory’s mission –to create materials, inspire minds to solve problems, and address global challenges –often emphasizing cross-disciplinary collaborations with other DOE National Laboratories, academia, and industry. Morris’ research has focused on a variety of materials science challenges, including alloy design, high entropy alloys, metallic liquids and glasses, and hydrogen storage and other confined fluids in porous media. He earned his B.S. in physics at Colorado State University in 1987, and his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University in 1992. He worked at Ames Laboratory, a Department of Energy (DOE) Laboratory located on the Iowa State University, first as a postdoctoral associate then as a scientific staff member. In 2003, he joined the Alloy Behavior and Design group at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL), and in 2005 also became joint faculty with the University of Tennessee’s Materials Science and Engineering department. At ORNL, Morris served as Deputy Director for the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center for Defect Physics, as Lab Coordinator for the Basic Energy Sciences -Materials Science and Engineering program, and as Materials Theory Group Leader.