Marina Leite Named UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow
Materials science and engineering associate professor Marina Leite has been named a 2022 UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow. The fellowship program, now in its 22nd year, recognizes and supports outstanding early-career faculty members at UC Davis. Chancellor’s Fellows receive a one-time award to support research, teaching and service and hold the title for five years.
Leite is one of 12 recipients this year and one of two from engineering.
“I am excited to see my work in research, teaching, and service recognized at the highest levels within the university and to be a valued member of this community,” she said.
Leite is internationally known for her research on functional materials for applications ranging from solar cells to photonics. Her group is particularly interested in perovskites, a promising class of highly-efficient photovoltaic materials, which convert light into energy. However, a major challenge is that these materials are sensitive to irreversible changes caused by environmental factors like temperature, humidity, exposure to oxygen and electrical conditions. Thus, Leite’s goal is to identify and control the physical and chemical phenomena that lead to this degradation.
Recently, her group has turned to machine learning principles to solve this problem. With so many candidate materials to sort through and a variety of conditions to consider, she thinks machine learning will accelerate the identification of the most promising perovskites. The group has also developed an imaging platform to visualize dynamic processes within photovoltaic materials while in operation with nanoscale spatial resolution. The system gives the team real-time movies of material properties.
Her team is also exploiting novel materials to further control the electromagnetic spectrum, which could have implications ranging from color displays to space exploration and photocatalysis, and other clean energy technologies. They combine experiments with computational methods to design, fabricate and characterize building blocks for photonics. Recently, they have combined optics and metallurgy to finely-tune light absorption in alloyed metallic thin films and nanostructures, which is relevant for photocatalysis and other clean energy technologies.
“I believe that Marina is perhaps the best and the brightest of the young generation of scientists exploring the local origins of photovoltaic and photonic phenomena in solids, elegantly combining material synthesis, local probe methods, and theory,” said Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Sergei Kalinin in a nomination letter.
Leite is also committed to increasing the number of underrepresented groups in STEM through research opportunities and mentorship. Out of the 35 students she has advised so far, more than 20 are from traditionally underrepresented groups in STEM.
“Marina is an extremely successful, creative and productive faculty member who is simultaneously an extraordinary mentor to students inside and outside the classroom,” said her colleague, professor Ricardo Castro in a nomination letter.
Leite has delivered more than 150 invited talks at conferences and research institutions across the globe, her research has been highlighted on the cover of 25 scientific journals, she is a senior member of the International Society for Optics and Photonics and she received the Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the Maryland Academy of Sciences in 2014.
She received her B.S. in chemistry at the Federal University of Pernambuco and her M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Campinas in Brazil. She completed her postdoc in applied physics at Caltech before starting her academic career at the University of Maryland. She joined UC Davis in 2019.