Mendoza Laboratory

Latest News (updated 2026/04/28)

• 2026/04/28 Group members sweep a series of prestigious awards! Congratulations to Brandon Lewis, recipient of both the College of Natural Science Undergraduate Research Scholarship and the Parker Scholarship (Summer 2026); to Daniel Maldonado-Lopez, awarded second place for the 2025-26 Fitch H. Beach Award, recognizing the most outstanding graduate researchers in the College of Engineering;
• 2025/12/15 Prof. Mendoza-Cortes has been acknowledged during the Nobel prize lectures by Prof. Omar Yaghi: 2025 Nobel Prize Lecture (Video and PDF)! Check Slide 49 of Leture's PDF.
• 2025/11/07 Our early work has contributed to the 2025 Nobel Prize! This early work was on cataloging all the secundary building units (SBUs) used for Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), (RSC 2009) which is widely used in the field, and one of the primary references when starting to design your MOFS.
• 2025/11/06: Our latest research is now on TV!: highlighting joint Cocker and Mendoza-Cortes work, "Wiggling atoms may lead to smaller, more efficient electronics". Story and TV segment
• 2025/10/23 Recognized as a Royal Society of Chemistry Emerging Investigators. RSC.
• 2025/09/30: Invited CM-AMO Seminar at the University of Michigan: "One Century of Quantum Science and the Future: Next-generation Quantum Materials Ultrafast Physics, Moiré Lattice Design and Beyond the Standard Model". Details
• 2025/09/17 Another stellar year of group recognitions! Congratulations to Austin Rodriguez, who collected a trio of honors: the PhD Dissertation Completion Fellowship (Fall 2025), the Software for Chemistry & Materials (SCM) Poster Award, and the Rising Star and Best Poster Abstract Award, both at the Machine Learning in Chemical and Materials Sciences 2025 (MLCM-25) Conference at Los Alamos National Lab; to Yu-Hsiu Lin, awarded the Fitch H. Beach Award as the Outstanding Graduate Student in Materials Science and Engineering for 2024-25; and to Daniel Maldonado-Lopez, recipient of both the ACS Bridge Program Travel & Professional Development Award and the Graduate School and College of Engineering Travel Grant to present at the 2025 ACS Spring National Meeting in San Diego. Bravo all around!
• 2025/09/16 New paper in Nature Photonics with the Cocker Lab: Terahertz field control of surface topology probed with subatomic resolution. Nature · MSUToday · arXiv.
• 2025/07/22: Collaboration with NVIDIA published on AI for higher order training for potentials: J. Chem. Theory Comput. paper: Does Hessian Data Improve the Performance of Machine Learning Potentials? (PubMed · PDF)
• 2025/02/13: Publication on how to design Twistronics, the next frontier in condensed matter physics: Nanoscale Advances paper: How can we engineer electronic transitions through twisting and stacking in TMDC bilayers and heterostructures? A first-principles approach. (Article · PDF)
• 2024/10/28: MSU is developing an ultrastable catalyst to improve fuel cells, co-led by Mendoza-Cortés (in collaboration with Princeton University). MSUToday. This work was published in the Journal Nature Materials, and was an interested work of experiment and theory, patent pending.