ORNL: ORNL’s Vasudevan elected Fellow of the American Physical Society

Rama Vasudevan, a research scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, or APS. The honor recognizes members who have made significant contributions to physics and its application to science and technology.

Vasudevan was cited by the APS Topical Group on Data Science for “pioneering and visionary development of open-sourced physics-based machine learning methods in atomic-scale and mesoscopic imaging, and their application in physics.”

At ORNL, Vasudevan leads the Data NanoAnalytics group at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, CNMS, which is a DOE Nanoscale Science Research Center. His research connects microscopy with machine learning and artificial intelligence to advance materials science. Vasudevan is part of an emerging effort to build smart, “self-driving” instruments and develop new techniques to accelerate the design and discovery of new materials. As a materials scientist, he focuses on oxide, ferroelectric, and memristive materials with unique functional properties for computing and electronic applications.

Vasudevan received a doctorate in materials science from the University of New South Wales. He first joined ORNL as a postdoctoral researcher in the Scanning Probe Microscopy Group and was hired as ORNL staff in 2016.

He sits on the editorial board of the IOP journal Machine Learning: Science and Technology. In 2019 Vasudevan and colleagues were awarded a Microscopy Today Innovation Award by the Microscopy Society of America.