Stefano Curtarolo Elected to the European Academy of Sciences

Stefano Curtarolo, the Edmund T. Pratt Jr. School Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Duke, has been elected to the European Academy of Sciences (EURASC).

The director of the Extreme Materials Laboratory at Duke Engineering was cited for “co-discovering Entropy Stabilized Oxides, High-entropy Carbides and CarboNitrides and for continuing pioneering work in disordered ceramics.”

Curtarolo has long been a pioneer in using computational methods to predict the recipes for new types of materials.

Curtarolo is a co-discoverer of materials that are among the hardest and most thermally stable known.

For more than a decade, his group has built and maintained the Automatic-FLOW for Materials Discovery database, or AFLOW, which provides information on more than 3.5 million material compounds with over 730 million calculated properties.

With this open-source information, researchers can search for new and stable materials to fit their application needs and test their functionality in a laboratory.

As an extension of this work, Curtarolo’s group discovered a new class of materials in 2018 that derive enhanced stability from a chaotic mixture of atoms.

Dubbed “high-entropy” materials, early work showed that recipes based on carbides could be among the hardest and most temperature-stable known to exist.

In 2021, the work led to a five-year, $7.5 million grant through the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program—Curtarolo’s second such award—to further explore high-entropy materials and develop a suite of AI-materials tools capable of the on-demand designing of similar materials with properties tailored to a wide range of applications.

Continuing to develop these equations and predictive abilities through this grant, Curtarolo and his collaborators expanded this class of materials into ceramics earlier this year. Harder than steel and stable in chemically corrosive environments, these materials could also form the basis of new wear- and corrosion-resistant coatings, thermoelectrics, batteries, catalysts and radiation-resistant devices.

Curtarolo and his collaborators also continue this line of work through an additional MURI awarded to the Missouri University of Science and Technology in March 2024.