Dr Alex Squires PhD

Dr Alex Squires

School of Chemistry
Group Leader in the Scanlon Materials Theory Group

Contact details

Email
a.squires@bham.ac.uk
Twitter
@agsquires
View my research portal
Address
School of Chemistry
University of Birmingham
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Alex is a group leader in the Scanlon Materials Theory Group, his research focuses on the influence of defects and disorder in functional materials.

He did his undergrad at University College London, followed by a PhD at the University of Bath. He joined the School of Chemistry in 2023 after a postdoctoral position as part of the Faraday Institutions FutureCat project.

Qualifications

PhD in Chemistry, University of Bath, 2022
MSci in Chemistry, University College London, 2017

Biography

Alex qualified with an MSci in chemistry from university college London in 2017. Following this, he undertook a PhD at the University of Bath under the supervision of Dr Benjamin Morgan modelling the defect chemistry of battery materials.

During this time he won a number of awards, including an Early Researcher Career award from the Science and Technologies Facilities Council to fund placements in learning statistical mechanical approaches towards the modelling of disordered materials.

He brought these skills to the Scanlon Materials Theory Group (SMTG) at UCL as part of a project funded by the Faraday Institution, and then moved to Birmingham to take up a Group Leader position when the SMTG moved to the School of Chemistry in 2023.

Research

  • Modelling Disorder
  • Defects
  • Scientific Software Development
  • Ion transport
  • Battery Materials
  • Electronic Structure of functional Materials

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Cen, J, Zhu, B, Kavanagh, SR, Squires, AG & Scanlon, DO 2023, 'Cation disorder dominates the defect chemistry of high-voltage LiMn1.5Ni0.5O4 (LMNO) spinel cathodes', Journal of Materials Chemistry A, vol. 11, no. 25, pp. 13353-13370. https://doi.org/10.1039/d3ta00532a

Nicolson, A, Breternitz, J, Kavanagh, SR, Tomm, Y, Morita, K, Tovar, M, Walsh, A, Schorr, S, Scanlon, DO & Squires, A 2023, 'Interplay of Static and Dynamic Disorder in the Mixed-Metal Chalcohalide Sn2SbS2I3', Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 145, no. 23, pp. 12509–12517. https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.2c13336

Squires, A & Scanlon, DO 2023, 'Understanding the limits to short-range order suppression in many-component disordered rock salt lithium-ion cathode materials', Journal of Materials Chemistry A, vol. 11, no. 25, pp. 13765-13773. https://doi.org/10.1039/d3ta02088f

Squires, A, Scanlon, DO & Morgan, BJ 2023, 'py-sc-fermi: self-consistent Fermi energies and defect concentrations from electronic structure calculations', Journal of Open Source Software, vol. 8, no. 82, 4962. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.04962

Squires, AG, Davies, DW, Kim, S, Scanlon, DO, Walsh, A & Morgan, BJ 2022, 'Low electronic conductivity of Li7La3Zr2O12 solid electrolytes from first principles', Physical Review Materials, vol. 6, no. 8, 085401. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.6.085401

Scanlon, DO, Morgan, BJ & Squires, A 2020, 'Native Defects and Their Doping Response in the Lithium Solid Electrolyte Li7La3Zr2O12', Chemistry of Materials. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemmater.9b04319

View all publications in research portal