Benjamin Cohen-Stead

Hi, and thank you for visiting my site!

I currently work as a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Steve Johnston’s research group in the physics department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. My research interests focus on the development and application of novel numerical methods to address problems in the field of condensed matter (CM) physics, with the ultimate goal to bridge the gap between theory and experiment. I am also interested in investigating opportunities to supplement standard numerical methods in CM with machine learning approaches in an effort to both accelerate existing computations, and also infer additional information from the high-dimensional data sets generated in studies of quantum materials.

Recently, my research efforts have focused on developing and applying quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods to study model Hamiltonians meant to describe various quantum materials. In parallel with this effort, I am also actively developing well-documented and user-friendly open-source QMC software packages, in an effort to make these algorithms more accessible to the broader CM community.