I do quantitative research at RAND, where my main interests lie in climate change mitigation and adaptation work, as well as emergency management.

In this work, I developed molecular dynamics simulations to generate Tantalum grain boundaries, and investigate them under high velocity impact. I analyzed data from these simulations, comparing them against accepted literature values. We were able to successfully show a two to three order of magnitude reduction in computational time with our method compared to common literature methods.I am the first author of our paper stemming from this work:"Effect of Grain Boundary Misorientation on Spall Strength in Ta via Shock-Free Simulations with Relatively few Atoms" by Joseph Caulkins, Carl Fauver, Sara Adibi, Justin Wilkersonhttps://doi.org/10.3390/met12101586

I used LAMMPS to run molecular dynamics simulations on a dataset of Nickel CSL boundaries. I analyzed the results of these simulations, using dimensionality reduction to improve interpretability and a transform from the literature to format data in a way to make them most useful to machine learning. This work has led to me co-authoring a paper in preparation:"Using Machine Learning to Predict Grain Boundary Energy", by Lingxiao Mu, Bo Lei, Jo Caulkins, Ian Chesser, Elizabeth Holm