Gorai Awarded NSF Grant to Advance Wurtzite Ferroelectrics

Prashun Gorai, Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering at RPI, and his collaborators at the Colorado School of Mines and Carnegie Mellon University have been awarded a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to accelerate the development of wurtzite ferroelectrics, a class of materials with potential to transform microelectronics. The award comes through NSF’s Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program, which this year saw its most competitive cycle to date.

Ferroelectric wurtzites could enable faster communications, more energy-efficient computing, and high-density data storage. Yet, commercial deployment has been slowed by limited understanding of how real-world defects such as atomic substitutions or structural damage affect their properties. Current computational models often rely on unrealistic assumptions that ignore these critical effects.

Gorai says, “This grant will allow us to bridge the gap between idealized theoretical models and real materials, while accelerating the design of wurtzite ferroelectrics for the next generation of microelectronics,” and adds, “These are exciting times to be working in computational science and engineering. Advances in computational approaches are bringing us closer to modeling digital twins, though challenges remain.” He is leading the project’s computational efforts, developing predictive frameworks to model the role of defects under realistic synthesis conditions.

This four-year project brings together leading experts in computation, synthesis, characterization, and testing from the U.S. and Germany. Partners include the Kiel University (Germany, DFG partner), Army Research Laboratory (ARL), and an industrial advisory board that will help guide scale-up and potential deployment. The new award builds on four years of NSF-funded DMREF collaboration among RPI, Mines, CMU, and Penn State, which has already advanced the discovery and design of wurtzite ferroelectrics. With this grant, the team will establish a framework not only for these materials but also for the broader design of functional materials critical to future technologies.

Dr. Prashun Gorai joined CBE in January 2025. He received his bachelor’s degree from IIT Madras (India) and his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Colorado School of Mines and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Dr. Gorai was previously a Research Assistant Professor at Mines. He uses quantum-chemical calculations, high-throughput computing, and machine learning to discover and design functional materials for energy conversion and storage, and next-generation microelectronics.