Biography
Alec Wills earned his PhD in Physics from Stony Brook in 2024, working in computational condensed matter with Marivi Fernández-Serra. His dissertation spanned ion solvation energetics in water, the effect of dielectric screening on Coulomb interactions between solvated ions, and machine-learning approaches to electronic structure calculations in density functional theory.
Before returning to Stony Brook, he spent two years at the New York Academy of Sciences. He was Program Lead for the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists and Program Manager for the Physical Sciences and Engineering category across the Blavatnik Awards' National, Regional, United Kingdom, and Israel programs, as well as the Sustainability category of the Tata Transformation Prize. His work that involved recruiting judges internationally, running multi-stage evaluations, and translating unfamiliar research for scientific and public audiences.
Research
Research interests carry forward from his doctoral work in computational condensed matter: molecular dynamics and ab initio simulation of aqueous systems, free-energy methods for solvation, and the development of machine-learning force fields and exchange-correlation functionals via differentiable implementations of the Kohn-Sham equations.