Biography
Alec Wills earned his PhD in Physics from Stony Brook in 2024, working in computational condensed matter with Marivi Fernández-Serra. His dissertation spanned ion solvation energetics in water, the effect of dielectric screening on Coulomb interactions between solvated ions, and machine-learning approaches to electronic structure calculations in density functional theory.
Before returning to Stony Brook, he spent two years at the New York Academy of Sciences. He was Program Lead for the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists and Program Manager for the Physical Sciences and Engineering category across the Blavatnik Awards' National, Regional, United Kingdom, and Israel programs, as well as the Sustainability category of the Tata Transformation Prize. His work there involved recruiting judges internationally, running multi-stage evaluations, and translating unfamiliar research for scientific and public audiences.
Research
His research is in electronic structure theory and scientific machine learning. He trains neural network exchange-correlation functionals by differentiating through the self-consistent field calculation, with exact physical constraints built into the network architecture, and has used ab initio and classical molecular dynamics to study how sodium and chloride ions pair in water and how the solvent screens the interaction between them. He also works on benchmarking the performance of scientific software on supercomputers.
Fuller descriptions of these projects, with publications and software, may be found on his research page at awills.org.