Benjamin Cohen-Stead

Hi, and thank you for visiting my site!

I am a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), and am based out of the Institute for Advanced Materials & Manufacturing (IAMM). My position at UTK was created after receiving the Scientific Software Research Faculty (SSRF) award, and my work focuses on the development of open source software tools for the condensed matter physics (CMP) research community. Prior to switching into my current position, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Steve Johnston’s research group at UTK after receiving my PhD from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Davis.

More broadly, my research interests focus on developing and applying novel numerical methods to address problems in condensed matter physics and bridge the gap between theory and experiment. I am also interested in investigating opportunities to supplement standard numerical methods in CMP with machine learning approaches to accelerate existing computations and infer additional information from the high-dimensional data sets generated in studies of quantum materials.

My recent development efforts have focused on applying quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods to study model Hamiltonians meant to describe various quantum materials. This includes developing well-documented and user-friendly open-source QMC software packages in an effort to make these algorithms more accessible to the broader CMP community.