Bhawna Sahni

Postdoctoral Research Fellow | Computational Materials Scientist

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I model phonon transport in amorphous materials and investigate switching mechanisms and defect behavior in wurtzite ferroelectric systems. Previously, at the University of Warwick, I applied my expertise in thermoelectrics to develop and implement first-principles numerical methods for analyzing electronic transport in advanced materials. My work involved density functional theory (DFT) and density functional perturbation theory (DFPT) to extract scattering matrix elements and compute electronic scattering rates for use in the Boltzmann transport equation (BTE). I have seven years of experience in computational physics, using a range of theoretical and numerical approaches to study thermoelectric properties. I am particularly interested in developing novel methods to enable more efficient and accurate materials simulations