Dr Joseph Prentice

Joseph Prentice did his undergraduate MPhys degree in Physics at University College, Oxford, conducting his final year MPhys project under the supervision of Dr Amalia Coldea. He then moved to the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge to do a PhD in computational condensed matter physics, under the supervision of Professor Richard Needs, funded by the EPSRC. His thesis, completed in 2017, was entitled ‘Investigating anharmonic effects in condensed matter systems’, and was awarded the IoP Theory of Condensed Matter Group “Sam Edwards” Thesis Prize in 2018. Whilst at Cambridge, he was (coincidentally) a member of St Edmund’s College. Following this, Joseph became a postdoctoral research associate at Imperial College London, funded by CCP9, and dually affiliated to the Departments of Materials and Physics, working with Professors Arash Mostofi and Peter Haynes. During this period, he also served as a part-time computational science specialist for the two departments.

Joseph’s research is in the realm of materials modelling – using theoretical tools to model and predict the properties of materials. In particular, Joseph is interested in optical, thermal, and vibrational properties of systems, with a focus on large-scale or complex organic solids, such as organic semiconductors. His past work has focused on the vibrational properties of defects in diamond, minerals in the lower mantle, and the optical properties of molecules in solution. In his research, Joseph typically makes use of first principles materials modelling methods, i.e., those that aim to solve the equations of quantum mechanics. His work usually involves the workhorse of materials modelling, density functional theory, but often other methods as well. Joseph is not only interested in applying such methods to systems of interest, but also in developing them. He is an active developer of the linear scaling density functional theory code ONETEP, and has contributed to the CAESAR code for calculating anharmonic effects.

J.C.A. Prentice, R.J. Charlton, A.A. Mostofi and P.D. Haynes, Combining embedded mean-field theory with linear-scaling density-functional theory, Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation (published 2019) https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jctc.9b00956

J.C.A. Prentice, R. Maezono and R.J. Needs, First-principles anharmonic vibrational study of the structure of calcium silicate perovskite under lower mantle conditions, Physical Review B 99, 064101 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.99.064101

J.C.A. Prentice, B. Monserrat and R.J. Needs, First-principles study of the dynamic Jahn-Teller distortion of the neutral vacancy in diamond, Physical Review B 95, 014108 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.95.014108

J.C.A. Prentice and A.I. Coldea, Modeling the angle-dependent magnetoresistance oscillations of Fermi surfaces with hexagonal symmetry, Physical Review B 93, 245105 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.93.245105