Emily Carter is a theorist first known for her work combining ab-initio quantum chemistry with dynamics and kinetics, especially as applied to surface chemistry. More recently, she has merged chemistry, solid state physics, materials science, applied mathematics, and mechanical engineering together, with her work on linear scaling, orbital-free density functional methods that afford treatment of thousands of atoms from first principles, her embedding theory that combines quantum chemistry with condensed matter electronic structure calculations, her local and spin-dependent pseudopotential theories, and her reduced scaling configuration interaction quantum mechanics methods. Prof. Carter is now merging these techniques with finite element approaches to undertake multi-length-scale simulations of materials. Some of the scientific questions she is working to answer include understanding how materials fail due to chemical and mechanical effects and how to optimally protect these materials against failure. This work has earned her a number of national and international awards including medals and fellowships of the American Vacuum Society, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. After 16 years on the Chemistry and Materials Science faculty at UCLA, she moved to Princeton in September 2004, where she was the Founding Director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment from 2010-2016 and a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics from 2004-2016. She currently holds courtesy appointments in Chemistry, Chemical and Biological Engineering, and three interdisciplinary institutes (PICSciE, PRISM, and PEI). In 2011, she was named the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment, and in 2016, the Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics