My name is Richard Tran, I’m a theoretical materials chemist working in an interdisciplinary field that integrates material science, chemical engineering, nanotechnology, data informatics, and machine learning. As a scientist, my hope is to further our collective knowledge by unraveling the underlying phenomena guiding the material world with which we build our society. As an engineer, my hope is to discover new materials with the technological relevance to impact our world and bring about a better tomorrow.

I had previously worked as a post-doctoral fellow under Professor Zachary Ulissi at Carnegie Mellon University for two years and currently finishing my fourth year at the University of Houston under the supervision of Professor Lars Grabow. I obtained my PhD in NanoEngineering with a focus in Materials Science at the University of California San Diego under the tutelage of Professor Shyue Ping Ong. As a post-doc, I had focused on the construction of machine learning models in the context of catalysis which culminated in the Open Catalyst 2022 (OC22) as well as the computational and mathematical modeling of dynamic catalyst systems. As a PhD student, I have constructed on high-throughput workflows powered by density functional theory (DFT) to construct databases such as the Crystalium and investigated the influence of defects on the properties of structural and quantum materials.

Scientific Web Applications and tutorials

In addition to being a personal website about my professional life and career, I’ll also be using it to host some useful toy web applications for scientific analysis. These are mainly intended for educational purposes and also serve as a way for me to further develop my programming skills during my free time. You can click on the buttons on top to see what I’ve been working on. The primary applications for surface science and catalysis related subjects will be hosted on the Lykoi platform (see tabs). This is a heroku hosted web application integrating a variety of different tools to help with analyzing things like Wulff constructions, surface and nanoparticle phase diagrams, and reaction diagrams. If you’re wondering what the name Lykoi means, it’s a breed of cats also called the “wolf cat”. Get it? WULFF CATalysis? What? Not like you can come up with anything better.

I’ll also be posting scientific tutorials regarding subjects such as ab-initio thermodynamics, catalysis, and electronic structure analysis.