Chuck (William) Witt completed his PhD at Princeton in 2019 and moved with his wife to Cambridge in early 2020 where he joined the Materials Theory Group in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University. He is interested in material physics and engineering, with emphasis on theory and computation..
A driving force behind his research is to understand how nanoscale phenomena in materials, governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, accumulate into the properties we observe at the length scales of everyday experience. His dissertation work involved simulating the behaviour of electron clouds in metals and semiconductors, and his current work applies the same techniques to explore unusual properties of materials at high pressures.
He was recently awarded a Schmidt Science Fellowship and, during that period, he will remain in Cambridge but will turn to polymer research, aiming to address sustainability challenges associated with consumer plastics.
