Scott Beckman Email & Phone Number

I graduated in 1999 from Iowa State University receiving the last Ceramic Engineering BS degree presented by that institution. I moved to attend graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. At Berkeley I saw quantum mechanics for the first time and fell in love with it. In 2005 I received my PhD in Materials Science and Engineering with minors in Semiconducting Materials and Quantum Mechanics. Although my primary experience was in Density Functional Theory (DFT) methods, I received a broad education in Materials Theory including multiple methods that allow for scaling of results. I move to Austin, Texas for a postdoctoral appointment at the Institute for Computational Engineering Sciences, which is a part of Physics and Chemical Engineering. I applied my background in DFT to study nanostructured materials. At Texas I also had my first experience coding DFT methods. After two years in Texas I move to New Jersey to work as a postdoc at Rutgers in the Department of Physics and Astronomy where I studied ferroelectric and piezoelectric materials. After a year at Rutgers I took a faculty appointment back in Iowa at ISU in the Department of Material Science and Engineering. As it so happened, I received my appointment in 2008, about a month prior to the stock market crash, which significantly reduced funding opportunities. Where as the traditional approach to academia involves picking a narrow scope, I broadened my scope to increase my funding potential. I was tenured and promoted in 2014 having raised a little over $2M in research funds in topics ranging from superhard ceramics, to fatigue in metals, to energy harvesting devices. I graduated to PhD students and wrote around 25 peer reviewed publications. During my time at ISU I organized a workshop on the Fundamental Physics of Ferroelectrics Materials and spend three months in Sendai, Japan, as a Visiting Associate Professor at Tohoku University, Institute for Materials Research. In 2015 Washington State had a cluster hire, bringing in four faculty in the area of high performance computing and I was hired. At WSU am continuing my research activities, still maintaining a broad scope to my efforts including publications in the areas of cancer research, catalysis, nuclear materials, and polymers. Around the time I moved to WSU I began in the area of data science, in particular what I call "Small Data" data science and this threads through all my work. I am also very involved in educational activities, recruiting, outreach, and academic administration.