Congratulations to Professor James Shepherd on winning a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. 

Assistant Professor James Shepherd of the University of Iowa Department of Chemistry has won a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, his second prestigious, federally-funded early-career research award in two years.

CAREER awards are the NSF’s most prestigious research award for early-career faculty in the sciences. The highly competitive awards grant funding to scientists who show exceptional promise for a productive and innovative academic career that integrates education and research while advancing their discipline.

Shepherd, a computational chemist who studies fundamental questions around how electrons interact in materials, will receive $648,345 over five years to advance the field of ground-state electronic structure calculations using wave function methods. His research group is working to advance understanding of the unique electronic structures of materials such as catalysts and semiconductors, so that the researchers can accurately simulate them using computer models. The ability to do so will enhance computer-aided design of materials.

“Simulating enough particles to represent the bulk properties of solids has been a major barrier towards our successful modeling of the complex quantum mechanics in certain materials,” Shepherd said. “With this award, we will be able to develop theory and software to enhance these simulations by focusing on the long-range character of electronic interactions in metals and semiconductors.”

In addition, Shepherd's CAREER grant will fund the development of a course-based undergraduate research program that will train undergraduate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) majors in the computer-aided design of new materials."