Efrain E. Rodriguez

Efrain E. Rodriguez received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. At UCSB Efrain worked with Anthony K. Cheetham, FRS, on the solid state chemistry of technetium and rhenium oxides. During his graduate career and as a post-baccalaureate intern, Efrain spent much of his time at the Lujan Neutron Scattering Center at Los Alamos National Laboratory where he mastered neutron powder diffraction and the pair distribution method for analyzing total scattering. After his PhD, Efrain went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for his National Research Council post-doctoral fellowship. At NIST, Efrain worked on the neutron scattering of iron-based superconductors. Today, Efrain’s research interests focus on extended solids containing transition metals and their physical properties. His National Science Foundation CAREER Award centers on finding transition metal sulfides and understanding how their structures relate to their magnetic and superconducting properties. Efrain also received the Margaret C. Etter Early Career Award in 2019 at the annual American Crystallographic Association meeting.

At UMD Efrain has established a program in solid-state chemistry with a multidisciplinary approach for the preparation and study of functional inorganic materials. Efrain and his group study crystallography in order to establish structure-property relationships in materials, and his group heavily uses neutron and synchrotron X-ray diffraction techniques. A particular expertise of Efrain’s group has been the use of neutrons to solve the magnetic structures of crystalline materials. Currently, Efrain is working on using crystallography and polararized neutron beams to study the phenomena of magnetoelectricity in metal phosphates with the olivine-type structure and metal silicates with the pyroxene-type structure. His group also uses in situ synchrotron X-ray and neutron diffraction studies to understand the reactivity of extended solids under various chemical environments such as oxidizing and reducing environments and hydrothermal conditions.