Dr. Eric Jankowski is the Director of the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering. Dr. Jankowski joined Boise State University in January 2015 and leads the Computational Materials Engineering Laboratory. The overall goal of Dr. Jankowski’s work is to leverage thermodynamics for societal good. This means understanding the factors that govern molecular self-assembly, and using that knowledge to engineer materials for generating energy, storing data, or curing disease. The approach taken by Dr. Jankowski is to create and use computational tools that efficiently generate important configurations of molecules. The goal of these computational models are: (1) To provide fundamental insight into material structure when physical characterization is inadequate, and (2) To identify the most promising material candidates when there are too many choices. Consequently, one of Dr. Jankowski’s research goals is to develop new computational techniques that solve open problems in materials simulation. Dr. Jankowski’s teaching goals include developing new curricula for scientific computation in engineering disciplines and demonstrating how practical and fun it is to use thermodynamics to solve engineering design problems.

Educational Background
Dr. Jankowski receiving his BSE, MS, and PhD all from the University of Michigan. During his PhD he worked under the mentorship of Dr. Sharon C. Glozter, focusing on the development of computational tools to study the self-assembly of nanoparticles. Dr. Jankowski began focusing on renewable energy generation during his postdoctoral positions at the University of Colorado and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. At these postdocs, Dr. Jankowski applied techniques he developed during his thesis to understand factors that determine the ordering of molecules in organic solar cells.