Ismaila Dabo received his B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Ecole Polytechnique (France) in 2002 and 2004. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2008. His doctoral research under the supervision of Dr. Marzari was dedicated to predicting the electrical response of quantum systems embedded in electrochemical environments and to studying chemical poisoning in low-temperature fuel cells. After graduation, Ismaila Dabo became a postdoctoral researcher and then a permanent researcher at Ecole des Ponts, University of Paris-Est (France). He joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State in 2013.
This faculty member is associated with the Penn State Intercollege Graduate Degree Program (IGDP) in Materials Science and Engineering (MatSE) where a multitude of perspectives and cross-disciplinary collaboration within research is highly valued. Graduate students in the IGDP in MatSE may work with faculty members from across Penn State.
Over the last decade energy intensity has decreased at a rate of –1.5%/year globally. Yet this decrease is slower than economic and demographic growth, leading to a sharp increase in the global energy demand of 2%/year.
Hence there is a need to develop sustainable energy alternatives by inventing materials that can store and convert energy faster and more efficiently. To address this need researchers are increasingly relying on data-driven materials discovery and design.
Our group develops and uses computational methods to understand, predict and improve the performance of materials for energy conversion and storage.
A first activity aims at describing the electrical response of electrode materials with a focus on metal-oxide pseudocapacitors and carbon-based supercapacitors. To this end we have developed self-consistent solvation models and Poisson-Boltzmann solvers to simulate electrodes under realistic electrochemical conditions taking into account the applied voltage and charge separation at electrode-electrolyte interfaces.
A second activity focuses on predicting the efficiency of energy conversion materials. Emphasis is placed on polymer semiconductors for organic solar cells and nanoporous semiconductors for thermoelectric systems. Understanding the photovoltaic and thermoelectric performance of materials requires reliable first-principles predictions of electron levels and band structures. We have developed electronic-structure methods beyond DFT to address this problem, enabling the systematic screening of photovoltaic and thermoelectric materials.
Our research stands at the frontier between materials science, physical chemistry, applied mathematics, and computer science. It is driven by collaboration with experiment. Its ultimate goal is to break down the complexity of materials problems and guide the development of future energy materials and technologies.