Siddharth Krishnakumar

PhD Student

My main interests lie in computational materials science and developing first principles methods. I completed my undergraduate in 2016 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, under a dual degree (Bachelors & Masters Combined) program. My field of study back then was investigating the “Effect of microstructural features on the deformation behaviour of dual phase steels for optimized morphology and enhanced ductility”. I then worked as a project associate for a year with Dr. Anand K. Kanjarla on implementing strain gradient plasticity into the Abaqus FEA software suite through a UMAT, a user subroutine, written in Fortran, to implement mechanical constitutive behaviour of a material. Subsequently, I joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for my doctorate, but then converted to a Masters Program because I could not find a fitting topic/advisor for my PhD. During my stay there I worked on various projects. I wrote a code to calculate the ground state energy of helium using a variational quantum Monte Carlo technique. I have also worked on molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo methods for atomic scale simulations. Now, I have joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the National University of Singapore as a graduate student advised by Dr. Pieremanuele Canepa.