Simon J. L. Billinge PhD

Simon Billinge’s research advances the study of nanoscale structure and its role in the properties of diverse materials used for energy, catalysis, environmental remediation, and pharmaceuticals.

Prof. Billinge earned his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, following a BA at Oxford University. He spent 2 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as a post-doc before joining the faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University in 1994. He became Associate Professor in 1999 and full Professor in 2003. In 2008 he took up his current position as Professor of Applied Physics, Applied Mathematics, and Materials Science at Columbia University and Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

His research focuses on the study of local-structure property relationships of disordered crystals and nanocrystals using advanced x-ray and neutron diffraction techniques. In particular, he is a leader in the development of the atomic pair distribution function (PDF) method applied to complex materials. These methods are applied to the study of nanoscale structure and its role in the properties of diverse materials of interest, for example, in energy, catalysis, environmental remediation, and pharmaceuticals. The approach is to use advanced x-ray, neutron, and electron scattering methods, utilizing some of the world's most powerful sources and applying advanced computation and analysis, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and graph-theoretic methods. A major activity is a study of the nanostructure inverse problem (NIP) where the goal is to obtain the 3D arrangement of atoms from structures with nanoscale atomic structures from scattering data, and the synthesis inverse problem, where the goal is to find an unknown synthesis recipe given the desired material product. These are nontrivial ill-posed inverse problems that require novel applied math and computational approaches to solve.

Prof. Billinge has published more than 300 papers in scholarly journals. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Neutron Scattering Society of America, a former Fulbright and Sloan fellow, and has earned a number of awards including being honored in 2011 for contributions to the nation as an immigrant by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the 2020 Distinguished Powder Diffraction Prize of the European Powder Diffraction Conference, the 2018 Warren Award of the American Crystallographic Association, the 2010 J. D. Hanawalt Award of the International Center for Diffraction Data, the University Distinguished Faculty Award at Michigan State, and the Thomas H. Osgood Undergraduate Teaching Award. He is Section Editor of Acta Crystalographica Section A: Advances and Foundations. He regularly chairs and participates in reviews of major facilities and federally funded programs.