Upcoming Event: Materials Discovery Seminar

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Jeffrey Neaton, Professor, UC Berkeley

Abstract

Biography

Jeff Neaton is responsible for Berkeley Lab’s research enterprise and serves as the Lab’s chief research liaison with the DOE Office of Science, the University of California, the national labs, and other key partners. He joined Berkeley Lab in 2003, and began his role as Interim Deputy Laboratory Director for Research and Chief Research Officer in 2026.  Neaton brings more than two decades of scientific leadership experience in both a national laboratory and academic setting, most recently serving as Associate Laboratory Director for Energy Sciences at Berkeley Lab, overseeing the Chemical Sciences and Materials Sciences Divisions, as well as the lab’s two Basic Energy Sciences-sponsored national scientific user facilities, the Advanced Light Source and the Molecular Foundry. He also serves as a Professor in the Department of Physics at U.C. Berkeley, and as a Member of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute, a partnership between UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab.  His research interests are in the theory of materials and condensed matter, and in developing and using computational and data-driven methods to predict, understand, and control phase behavior and electronic phenomena in complex materials from first principles. He serves on numerous international advisory boards, and from 2012-2018, he served as Division Associate Editor for Physical Review Letters. He is the recipient of a 2017 NERSC High Impact Scientific Achievement Award, and he was the 2018 Pariser-Parr Distinguished Lecturer in Chemistry at the University of North Carolina and the 2026 Pritchett Lecturer in Materials Science at Georgia Tech. The author of more than 300 publications, he is an ISI Highly-Cited Researcher.   Neaton has a deep commitment to workforce development, cultivating stewardship, and collaboration across research divisions, operations, federal agencies, and the national lab complex. He oversees Berkeley Lab’s research support functions, and continues to steer long-term development projects such as the upgrade of the Advanced Light Source, the world’s leading soft x-ray source.  Neaton received his B.A. in physics and astrophysics in 1995 from the University of Minnesota, his Ph.D. in physics in 2000 from Cornell University, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University 2000-2003, and later at Berkeley Lab from 2003-2005.