Jan Janssen

Jan Janssen is the Group Leader for Materials Informatics at the Max-Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials, leading research in applying computational and machine learning methods to materials discovery. He previously served as a Director's Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and earned his PhD from the MPIE Düsseldorf. His work focuses on ab-initio thermodynamics, machine-learned interatomic potentials, and high-performance computing workflows.

Education:

• PhD in Physics, Max Planck Institute for Iron Research (MPIE), Düsseldorf (2015–2021)
• MSc/BSc in Physics, Technical University of Kaiserslautern (2008–2015)

Research Interests: Janssen’s research integrates computational materials science with machine learning, emphasizing automated workflows, open-source software (e.g., pyiron), and Bayesian optimization for materials discovery. His team develops tools like Executorlib for scaling Python workflows on HPC systems and leverages LLMs for scientific automation.

Contributions:

• Lead developer of pyiron, an open-source computational materials science framework
• Maintainer of conda-forge packages for materials informatics
• Contributor to projects like FitSNAP and LangSim

Labs/Teams: He leads the Materials Informatics group, advancing methods for high-throughput materials exploration and AI-driven scientific workflows.