Aurora Pribram-Jones, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley

Aurora Pribram-Jones

Aurora Pribram-Jones is a Lawrence Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Chemistry Department at the Berkeley campus. She received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Irvine, where she studied with Kieron Burke. Aurora develops finite-temperature and ensemble electronic structure methods for use in materials science, quantum chemistry and warm dense matter theory. Her recent publications focus on potential functional theory, linear response for thermal ensembles and mathematical conditions on finite-temperature exchange-correlation functionals. She has published in Physical Review, The Journal of Chemical Physics and Annual Reviews of Physical Chemistry. Aurora also collaborates with Harvey Mudd College researchers, using high-performance computing to simulate high-entropy alloys. She is a member of the HyMARC/HySCORE teams at LLNL and U.C. Berkeley, which examine metal organic frameworks as materials for hydrogen storage. Her community activities include co-founding a U.C. Irvine program to help senior undergraduates and new graduate students apply for national fellowships and mentoring undergraduate mathematicians and scientists at Harvey Mudd and U.C. Irvine. In her final year of doctoral studies, Aurora served on the Diverse Educational Communities and Doctoral Experiences Student Council as the Physical Sciences Division representative and volunteered as a teaching assistant for graduate courses in mathematics and time-dependent density functional theory. She most recently spent an afternoon with fifth- and-sixth graders discussing the many ways to be a chemist and how superheroes rely on metallurgy in the Marvel Universe.