Renata M. Wentzcovitch

Wentzcovitch develops and applies materials simulation methods to study materials properties at high pressures and temperatures, especially minerals at planetary interior conditions. Her research interests include:

1. Mineral physics with applications to geophysics (seismology and geodynamics) and geochemistry (water speciation and isotope fractionation in minerals). 
2. Thermoelastic properties of materials at extreme conditions
3. Materials discovery at (exo)planetary interior conditions
4. H₂O-ice physics
5. Properties of strongly correlated oxides and their crystalline defects
6. Spin crossover systems
7. Simulation methods development
8. Automation of high-throughput phase space sampling calculations.

Prior to joining the Columbia Engineering faculty in 2017, she was a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota, where she was a member of the graduate faculties in the School of Physics and Astronomy, Department of Earth Sciences, Chemical Physics Program, and Scientific Computation Program, where she served as Director of Graduate Studies. She has been a regular visiting professor at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste (IT) since 1998, Earth-Life Science Institute and Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2002, University of Frankfurt since 2008, University of Science and Technology of China and Beijing Computational Science and Engineering Center since 2012. She is visiting the Center for Computational Quantum Physics at the Flatiron Institute, Simons Foundation in New York.

She has served in the Chair line of the Division of Computational Physics of the American Physical Society. Now she serves in the President line of the Mineral and Rock Physics Section of the American Geophysical Union.