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WMI Team Grant D. Smith, Ph. D., President Dmitry Bedrov, Ph. D., Vice President of Research Oleg Borodin, Ph.D., Senior Scientist James S. Smith, Ph.D., Vice President of Business Development Scott Bardenhagen, Ph.D., Senior Scientist Justin B. Hooper, Ph.D., Scientist
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Dr. Smith has been involved in computational and experimental polymer physics research for over 20 years with interests primarily in elucidating the property/structure relationships in soft condensed matter. He has authored over 200 publications including recent works focusing on multiscale phenomena of nanostructured materials for energy storage and production, nanoparticle composites, biomaterials, and self-assembling nanostructures. Dr. Smith currently holds a Professor rank position at the Department of materials science and Engineering at the University of Utah where he has been a faculty member since 1997. Prior to his appointment at the University of Utah, Dr. Smith was an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a senior research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA.
Dr. Bedrov received his Ph. D. from the Chemical and Fuels Engineering Department at the University of Utah in 1999. He has been involved in research covering a multitude of soft condensed matter materials and the development and application of multiscale modeling techniques. Dr. Bedrov has published over 90 articles in peer reviewed journals with recent works studying self-assembly of nanoparticles in solutions and polymer melts, interaction between polymer brushes, structure and dynamics in micellar gels, and molecular scale structure-property relationships of energetic materials under extreme conditions. Dr. Bedrov has been a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Utah since 2000 where he has managed the resources and personnel of several large projects.
Dr. Borodin received his Ph. D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Utah in 2000. Since that time Dr. Borodin has been a Research Assistant Professor at the Materials Science & Engineering Department at the University of Utah since 2000. His recent research has focused on polymer, liquid and gel electrolytes for lithium battery applications as well as understanding of structural and transport properties of room-temperature ionic liquids. Dr. Borodin is the primary developer of highly transferable, quantum chemistry based, polarizable force field (APPLE&P) that allows prediction of thermodynamic and transport properties from classical molecular dynamics simulations with unprecedented accuracy for variety of systems, including room-temperature ionic liquids, electrolytes and SEI components for Li-ion batteries, energetic materials, a number of polymers such as poly(dimethyl siloxane), poly(ethylene oxide), poly(propylene oxide), poly(trimethylene oxide), poly(ester urethane), perfluoroalkanes, etc. Dr. Borodin is a co-developer of the MD simulations code Lucretius and Force Field Fitting toolkit and has over 70 publications.
Dr. Smith has been working on the study of nanostructured materials, molecular interactions, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and PDMS-silica nanocomposites. He has co-developed a quantum chemistry force field for PDMS and worked with multiple histogram techniques for investigating the free energy of interactions in nanoparticle composites and single chain stretching as well as performing atomistic investigations of PDMS-silica systems while working summers at Los Alamos National Laboratory. From the fall of 2004 to the spring of 2005, Dr. Smith was an associate for the Lassonde New Venture Development Center charged with developing marketing strategies and business plans for emerging technologies at the University of Utah and was a member of the team that won the 2005 Utah Entrepreneur Challenge business plan competition. Previously Dr. Smith worked as a founding engineer at Innosys Inc. designing and building facilities as well as fabricating and testing MEMS devices for communications applications. Additionally, he has over 5 years advanced ceramics manufacturing experience with another Utah area startup company. Dr. Smith received his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Utah.
Dr. Bardenhagen has studied materials and numerical simulation techniques for over 15 years. His materials research has focused on modeling mesostructural effects on material response. He has studied nanocomposites, foams, granular materials, biological membranes and plastic bonded explosives. He developed a more general framework for the Material Point Method, improving the algorithm's properties and allowing identification with a more general class of particle methods. This resulted in the Generalized Interpolation Material Point (GIMP) method class of formulations. He has published over 25 articles in these areas. He spent thirteen years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, mostly in the Theoretical Division, prior to joining WMI in 2008. He held a research faculty position at the University of Utah for several years and visited Eglin Air Force Base (AFRL) for several months as a guest scientist. Dr. Bardenhagen has engineering (PhD) and applied mathematics (MS) degrees from the University of Michigan, 1994.
Dr. Hooper earned his Ph. D. from the Department of Materials Engineering and Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005. Previous research by Dr. Hooper has focused on the development of theoretical and computational tools for predicting the association and self-assembly of bare and functionalized nanoparticles in solutions as well as composites. Dr. Hooper’s more recent work has focused on computational investigations of energetic material components, both inert and active, as well as co-development of quantum-based force fields for molecular ionic crystals with potential energetic materials applications.