Jose Mendoza Cortes
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Assistant Professor
Biography
Dr. Mendoza's research has been featured in Forbes magazine, CNBC, Public Radio, MRS Bulletin, C&EN News, Laser Focus World magazine, and the DOE Highlights. His research has been disseminated through 53 invited talks both nationally and internationally. Dr. Mendoza's research has received funding from NSF, DOE, DOD, APS, Sloan Foundation, to name a few.Dr. Mendoza was awarded the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Newcomb Cleveland Award, this Society's oldest and most prestigious award; the International Center for Material Research (ICMR) fellowship; and the Roberto Rocca Fellowship. More recently, he has been awarded the ONR Faculty Fellowship (2017), and the Carl Storm Fellowship (2018). In 2018, he was named an Emerging Investigator by the Royal Society of Chemistry and he is the only researcher to be named four times in a row to the prestigious Scialog Fellowship (2020-2023) for his contributions to the development of negative emissions technologies.
Our objective is to form renaissance scientists and engineers. In a similar fashion, we attack problems with a renaissance approach, where we combine several areas of knowledge, independently of their formal separation by the human mind. Current Main Research Interests: Quantum and Atomistic Simulations, Machine Learning, Condensed Matter Theory, Theoretical Chemistry, Computational Material Sciences, Scientific Computing, Quantum Computing Algorithms, Energy/Materials.Our expertise is in quantum simulations, Materials by Design, Multiscale Simulations, Big Data, Machine Learning and Quantum Computing Algorithms. Our research philosophy focuses on attacking problems in engineering and pure sciences and developing methods needed to solve them.My research focuses on the development and application of numerical techniques to study structural, electronic, transport and optical properties of materials, low-dimensional systems and nanostructures. Computer simulations performed in my group have addressed physical and chemical properties of 2D-materials, porous materials, catalysts, nanotubes, polymers, catalytic/metallic/magnetic clusters and molecular machines.
Because of graduate and post-graduate studies advisers, Dr. Mendoza-Cortes' academic great grandparents are Marie Curie and Paul Dirac.
Education
- Postdoc, University of California, Berkeley and Berkeley National Lab, 2014
- Staff Scientist, California Institute of Technology & Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, 2013
- Ph.D., Materials Science, California Institute of Technology, 2012
- M.Sc., Applied Physics, California Institute of Technology, 2010
- B.Sc., Tec de Monterrey (ITESM), 2008. University of California, Los Angeles, 2008
Selected Publications
- Dr. Mendoza's publications have over 9,700 times with an average of over 159 citations/paper, as well as Erdős number = 5, H-index = 33, and i10-index = 45
- V. Jelic, S. Adams, D. Maldonado-Lopez, I. A. Buliyaminu, M. Hassan, J.L. Mendoza-Cortes*, T. L. Cocker*, “Terahertz field control of surface topology probed with subatomic resolution” Nature Photonics, 2025, 19, 1048-1055 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-025-01751-9
- A. Rodriguez, J. S. Smith, J.L. Mendoza-Cortes*, “Does Hessian Data Improve the Performance of Machine Learning Potentials?” Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, 2025, 21, 14, 6698 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jctc.5c00402
- "Reaction-driven restructuring of defective PtSe2 into ultrastable catalyst for the oxygen reduction reaction" W Niu, S Pakhira, G Cheng, F Zhao, N Yao, JL Mendoza-Cortes, BE Koel Nature Materials 23, 1704–1711 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-02020-w
- A. Sen, L. J. Scanlon, A. M. Gaona-Carranza, J.L. Mendoza-Cortes*, J. Pollanen*, R. R. Lunt*, W. J. Gannon*, “Impact of Grain Size on Low-Temperature Carrier Phase Coherence Length in Polycrystalline Halide Perovskite Films” Advanced Materials Interfaces, 2025, 12 https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/admi.202500567
MSU Scholar
Google Scholar
Awards
- 2026 Keynote speaker, ACS Spring 2026
- 2025 Nominated for the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists
- 2025 Advanced Materials ‘Rising Stars’
- 2025 Emerging Investigator by the Royal Society of Chemistry, UK.
- 2024 Telly Award. The Telly Awards honors excellence in video and television across all screens and is judged by leaders from video platforms, television, streaming networks, and production companies. They received over 13,000 entries from all 50 states and five continents.
- 2023 Speaker for the annual Blue/Green Seminar (Joint Seminar between UM and MSU since 1983)
- Scialog fellow (50 faculty/year including the USA and Canada), 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
- Emerging Investigator by the Royal Society (RSC), 2018
- Carl Storm Fellowship, Gordon Research Conference, 2018
- ONR Summer Faculty Research Fellow, 2017
- AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, 2007. AAAS's oldest and most prestigious award (AAAS = American Association for the Advancement of Science)
