This past July, Philip Dee (BS Physics Honors, BE Civil Engineering, 2013) became a Eugene P. Wigner Fellow at the Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, TN. This position is a highly competitive and prestigious fellowship for distinguished staff at ORNL. Philip’s fellowship research at ORNL will focus on developing innovative computational methods for simulating models of quantum materials, mainly using physics-informed machine learning approaches and many-body theory. These methods will help the field overcome challenges associated with the high degree of algorithmic complexity that hinders simulations of fully quantum models and leverages the world-class supercomputing resources at ORNL. Philip’s ongoing research interests lie at the intersection of condensed matter theory, computational physics, and artificial intelligence.

At CSU, Philip conducted undergraduate research with Professors Kiril Streletzky and James Lock, studying light scattering phenomena experimentally and theoretically under the Undergraduate Summer Research Award (USRA) program. During this time, Philip also served as a teaching assistant in undergraduate labs and led the CSU’s chapter of the Society of Physics Students as its president.

Philip obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Tennessee in 2021 under Professor Steven Johnston, where he worked primarily in condensed matter theory. His Ph.D. research explored the interplay of superconductivity with other competing phases in materials, such as charge order. Philip spent two years working and collaborating at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working on projects supported by a Department of Energy (DOE) SCGSR graduate fellowship awarded to him in 2018. There, he used the Summit supercomputer to run simulations on layered superconductors.

Before joining ORNL in the summer 2024, Philip worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the groups of Professor Peter Hirschfeld and Richard Hennig at the University of Florida, where he collaborated with both theorists and experimentalists to develop new methods for predicting and discovering promising new superconductors. With a combination of state-of-the-art ab initio tools, many-body theory, data-driven high-throughput schemes, and quick experimental synthesis/measurement workflows, it is now possible to improve significantly on the long-standing difficulties in predicting new superconductors.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Philip Dee on his new Distinguished Research Fellow position at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

From ORNL site: "Wigner Fellows are typically in the fundamental sciences and demonstrate competency in advanced materials, chemistry, computational science, neutron scattering, nuclear physics, and plasma and fusion energy sciences. Dr. Eugene P. Wigner was a 1963 Nobel Laureate in physics and ORNL’s first director of research and development (1946–1947)."