Guest Seminar - Harnessing Entropy as a Materials Engineering Tool: Disorder-Driven Material Function as an Alternative to Simple doping - Dr. Akanksha Joshi

Abstract

Materials are traditionally engineered through targeted doping and ordered chemistry, where functional control arises from localized compositional perturbations; entropy engineering reframes this paradigm by elevating disorder itself to a deliberate design principle for governing material behaviour. Rather than treating compositional complexity as an imperfection, this perspective regards disorder as a tunable structural attribute that reshapes stability, transport, and redox processes across length scales. This talk will present an overview of a materials-science framework that bridges conventional doping chemistry and entropy-guided design. In low-entropy systems, dilute substitution modulates bonding locally, often providing incremental stabilization. In contrast, multi-principal compositions distribute chemical heterogeneity throughout the lattice, decoupling average crystallography from local coordination and enabling collective accommodation of strain and chemical fluctuations. Such disorder-enabled stabilization is particularly advantageous for battery cathode materials, where repeated ion insertion, redox activity, and mechanical stress demand tolerance to coupled chemical and structural fluctuations. Finally, future directions will be discussed, focusing on extending disorder-guided design to new compositional spaces, alternative synthesis pathways, and broader classes of functional materials in which stability and performance emerge from collective, rather than local, structural responses.

Bio

Dr. Akanksha Joshi is a postdoctoral researcher at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, in the group of Prof. Malachi Noked. Her research focuses on materials-science approaches to controlling structure–function relationships in functional oxides, with particular emphasis on compositional complexity and disorder as design principles. She works on the synthesis and multiscale characterization of compositionally complex and high-entropy materials, integrating electrochemical measurements with operando and in-situ techniques to probe structural stability and redox behaviour. Dr. Joshi received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Delhi, India and has published extensively on functional oxide materials for electrochemical energy storage. Her research vision emphasizes scalable, disorder-guided materials design beyond lithium-based technologies.