Sara Kadkhodaei

Sara Kadkhodaei

Sara Kadkhodaei is an assistant professor in the civil and materials engineering department at UIC. She received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Sharif University of Technology. She completed both a master’s degree in physical chemistry and a doctoral degree in materials science from Brown University.

Her research interest is in the development of advanced first-principles and atomistic computational methods to understand the underlying physics of materials and their integration into high-throughput computational frameworks, specifically to aid in cost-effective silico-discovery of novel materials for a range of applications, from structural alloys to energy storage materials.

Kadkhodaei developed two graduate-level interdisciplinary courses in her first year of teaching at UIC. Both courses, Advanced Thermodynamics of Materials and Diffusion Phenomena in Materials, focus on understanding the underlying theories that describe thermodynamics and kinetic processes in solid states. Students learn how to combine the theoretical knowledge obtained throughout the courses with state-of-the-art software tools to examine these theories on real physical systems.

Subject areas:

• Functional materials performance
• Materials phenomena
• Computational materials science
• Data-driven materials discovery
• Solid-state thermodynamics and kinetics