A research scientist with the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Ayana Ghosh was named the 2024 Early Discovery Award winner by the American Ceramic Society. The award recognizes an early career member of the organization who has contributed to basic science in the field of glass and ceramics.

Ghosh was pleasantly surprised to receive such a prestigious award, given the highly competitive field of scientists she and her team had entered with their nomination. Ghosh was particularly proud of this distinction coming from an international organization. 

Ghosh’s work spans multiple projects at ORNL, including work with the INTERSECT and AI Initiatives, bringing her expertise in theory and simulations to machine learning, deep learning and experiments. 

However, it’s her work applying causal machine learning — which estimates causal quantities, cause-effect relations and predicts potential outcomes — to physics and material science problems that she enjoys most.

“What really fascinates me is looking into these types of methods solving fundamental physics or material science problems because I have not seen a lot of papers exploring this area,” said Ghosh. “That’s the very unique direction we’ve been working lately.” 

Ghosh first joined ORNL in 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher after earning her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Connecticut and became a full-time research scientist in 2023 working in computational chemistry and nanomaterials. She’s previously worked as a graduate researcher at UConn and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Ghosh is especially excited about some upcoming projects for her and her team, including more work exploring causal methods applied to different material science problems and running simulations on the Summit supercomputer. Summit is part of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility located at ORNL.

“There are some large-scale simulations we have been running, so it will be great to see if there are utilities for these types of methods,” Ghosh said. “Now, we want to scale this up to see if we can do causal analysis to understand underlying physics and causal mechanisms in even larger material systems.” 

The American Ceramic Society is professional organization working to advance the study, understanding, and use of ceramics and related materials.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science. — Mark Alewine

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