Chris A. Marianetti

Marianetti has a diverse academic background spanning numerous disciplines. He did his B.S. in Welding Engineering at The Ohio State University, and, during this time, also spent one year at the General Motors Technical Center working on robotic resistance welding.  He later earned a M.S. in Welding Engineering at The Ohio State University. His thesis research dealt with weld-metal hydrogen-assisted cracking, a chronic problem in many high-strength steel weldments. He then moved in a different direction, earning a PhD in computational Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His thesis research focused on applying first-principles methods, such as Density Functional Theory (DFT) and Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT), to energy storage materials. He continued developing/applying DFT and DMFT to strongly correlated electron systems in a post-doctoral position in condensed matter physics at Rutgers University. Following Rutgers, he moved to a second post-doctoral position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) where he utilized LLNL's world-class supercomputers to apply DFT and DMFT to plutonium.  He then moved to the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.