Axel van de Walle

Axel van de Walle is a Professor of Engineering at Brown University's School of Engineering. He holds a B.Eng. in Engineering Physics from École Polytechnique de Montréal (1995) and a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT (2000). His career includes postdoctoral research at Northwestern University and a tenure at Caltech as an Assistant Professor in Applied Physics and Materials Science.

His research focuses on computational materials science, first-principles calculations, thermodynamics, and energy materials. Key areas include phase diagram modeling, high-entropy alloys, and computational studies of bulk metallic glasses. He leads the Virtual Materials Laboratory, developing tools like the Alloy-Theoretic Automated Toolkit (ATAT) for materials design and thermodynamic analysis.

His work bridges computational and experimental methods, with projects such as investigating rare earth oxides under extreme conditions and optimizing alloy compositions for aerospace applications. Notable contributions include the prediction of high-melting-temperature materials and advancements in CALPHAD database integration.

He has secured grants including 'Collaborative Research: Rare Earth Materials Under Extreme Conditions' (2022) and contributed to the United States COVID-19 Forecast Hub dataset (2021). His lab collaborates on software tools like DFTTK and aflow++ to automate first-principles thermodynamics and machine learning-driven materials discovery.