The Department of Aerogels and Aerogel Composites at the Institute of Materials Research is well-known for their research on the development of highly open-porous nanostructured materials based on organic and inorganic sources by means of the sol-gel process. The research focus lies in application-oriented development of organic, inorganic, carbon, and biopolymer aerogels and their composites by employing state-of-the-art experimental and theoretical/computational methods.

The research group Atomistic and Microstructure Simulation of Aerogels concerns itself with modeling and simulation of the above-mentioned materials either by applying or developing new theoretical methodologies at
the atomistic scale using methods such as density functional theory or molecular dynamics simulations and at the microstructure scale by using coarse grained or cellular automata-based models. Additionally, machine learning methods are employed for predictive modeling and inverse design of materials towards reverse engineering.

You will support our team in the research and development of digital twins of aerogels at the materials level and towards correlating experimental synthesis protocols and parameters to the computational models, thus
accelerating materials development.

Your key responsibilities include:

• development of new computational models for aerogels and aerogel composites, those that describe their synthesis process
• bridge the gap between laboratory-based and computational research
• handling laboratory/device responsibilities
• writing project reports
• supervising Bachelor- and Master-thesis
• present the project results at conferences
• publish papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals
• new project acquisition