Valentin V. Karasiev

Biography

Dr. Karasiev received a M.Sc. degree in Physics from St. Petersburg State University (St. Petersburg, Russia) in 1990 and received his Ph.D. in Physics and Math from the same institution in 1993. For two years he was a Research Scientist at the Institute of Physics, St. Petersburg State University (Russia), and in 1996 became a postdoc Research Associate at the Chemistry Center, Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (Caracas, Venezuela). In 1998 he was promoted to Associate Investigator and in 2004 to Full Investigator. Between 1999 and 2004 he held a temporary (part-time) Assistant Professor position in the Simon Bolivar University (Caracas, Venezuela) Physics Department. He spent two years (2004–2006) as a visitor (during Sabbatical) at the Quantum Theory Project (QTP), University of Florida. Dr. Karasiev permanently moved to the U.S. in 2010 and joined QTP as a postdoc Research Associate and later on became an Assistant Scientist. He joined LLE as a Scientist in 2017. Dr. Karasiev has published 80+ theoretical papers at top peer-reviewed physical and chemical research journals that received ~1700 citations so far. In 2001 he received the IBM-Löwdin Fellowship of the 41st Sanibel Symposium, and in 2019 he received the Talman Scholar Award of the 59th Sanibel Symposium. Dr. Karasiev is also the Principal Investigator on a $400,000.00 grant funded by the National Science Foundation: PHY-1802964, Developing Thermal Hybrid Exchange-Correlation Functionals for Accurate Prediction of Transport and Optical Properties of Warm Dense Plasmas. 

Research Areas

• High-Energy-Density Physics (HEDP) and Warm Dense Matter (WDM): Application of density functional theory based methods to study properties of materials under extreme conditions that include equation of state (EOS), transport properties (electrical, optical, thermal conductivities) for wide range of thermodynamic conditions including the path to inertial confinement fusion
• Thermal Density Functional Theory (DFT): development of exchange-correlation free energy and orbital-free non-interacting free-energy density functionals (i.e., functionals with explicit temperature dependence) for reliable and efficient treatment of materials under extreme conditions of pressure and temperature by means of ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) driven by Kohn–Sham and/or orbital-free DFT forces
• Computational physics/Software development: Implementation of developed density functionals in computational packages for large-scale AIMD simulations for materials; development of the Kubo–Greenwood electrical conductivity post-processing package. Development of nonlocal and local pseudo-potentials transferable to high compressions and high temperatures

Full publication list can be found here