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Professional headshot of Jose Mendoza Cortes

Jose Mendoza Cortes

Assistant Professor

Chemical Engineering and Materials Science (ChEMS), College of Engineering

Engineering Bldg, 428 S Shaw Ln Room 3517

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.

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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

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Awards

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

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Publications

Dr. Mendoza's publications have over 8,000 citations, with an average of over 157 citations/paper, as well as Erdős number = 5, H-index = 29, and i10-index = 42

"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

"Nitrogen‐Containing Surface Ligands Lead to False Positives for Photofixation of N2 on Metal Oxide Nanocrystals: An Experimental and Theoretical Study" Daniel Maldonado‐Lopez, Po‐Wei Huang, Karla R Sanchez‐Lievanos, Gourhari Jana, Jose L Mendoza‐Cortes, Kathryn E Knowles, Marta C Hatzell Advanced Functional Materials, 2413319, 2024 https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202413319

"Beyond lithium-ion batteries: Are effective electrodes possible for alkaline and other alkali elements? Exploring ion intercalation in surface-modified few-layer graphene and examining layer quantity and stages" YH Lin, JL Mendoza-Cortes J. Appl. Phys. 136, 075001 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0220800

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