Functional Inorganic Materials for Energy and Biomineralization

Neilson Group: new materials and methodologies from kinetic control

Our research revolves around understanding and controlling the formation of materials, their structure and their properties, i.e., materials design. We focus on manipulating and understanding local chemical environments and their influences on electronic properties in new materials, such as magnetism. The overarching theme is correlating structural details of materials with their functional behavior in the development of new and efficient materials of relevance to energy conversion and conservation, for example, new hard magnetic materials and semiconductors for solar energy conversion. The approach is based on asking the question: How does one selectively position (and then find) atoms within a bulk solid? The same overarching chemical perspectives apply to the area of biomineralization as well, particularly to that of bone remodeling. This is an interdisciplinary problem fundamentally rooted in inorganic chemistry, and with profound implications for human and animal disease. Many of the problems we face are intrinsically interdisciplinary as our chemistry sits at the interface with both physics and biology.

Curriculum Vitæ as a PDF

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Selected Reviews and Perspectives

	J. R. Neilson, M. J. McDermott, K. A. Persson, Modernist Materials Synthesis: Finding Thermodynamic Shortcuts with Hyperdimensional Chemistry (Invited Paper). J. Mater. Res., (2023), 38, 2885-2893. [doi]
	A. J. Martinolich, J. R. Neilson, Towards Reaction-By-Design: Achieving Kinetic Control of Solid State Chemistry with Metathesis (Perspective). Chem. Mater., (2017), 29(2), 479-489. [doi]
	E. M. Mozur, J. R. Neilson, Cation Dynamics in Hybrid Halide Perovskites. Ann. Rev. Mat. Res. (2021), 51, 269-291. [doi]
	A.E.Maughan, A.M.Ganose, D.O.Scanlon, J.R.Neilson, Perspectives and Design Principles of Vacancy-Ordered Double Perovskite Halide Semiconductors, Chem. Mater., (2019), 31(4), 1184-1195. [doi]

September 2023. From left to right: Autumn Peters, Thinh Tran, Aaron Hovey, Dominic Asebiah, Layton Rudolph, Corlyn Regier, Ren Borgia, JRN

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