Rees Chang
AI Scientist at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRees Chang is a PhD candidate at UIUC with nine years of experience at the intersection of computational materials science and machine learning, developing state-of-the-art generative models and transfer learning frameworks for materials discovery. He combines deep academic rigor—co-advised by leaders in materials and ML—with practical software engineering, contributing key IO and supercell features to the widely used pymatgen library. His research spans autoregressive transformers, equivariant diffusion graph networks, and amortized mixture models to produce crystal structures that validate via DFT and peer-reviewed venues such as NeurIPS and ICLR AI4Mat. Rees has hands-on experience across national labs and industry research internships (Argonne, Berkeley Lab, NASA Goddard), and his projects often translate to open-source tools and reproducible workflows. Notably, he blends coarse-to-fine generative modeling with physics-aware representations—enabling explicit-density sampling over arbitrary polygons—a detail that highlights both his theoretical and implementation depth.
9 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Materials Science and Engineering with Honors, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Materials Science and Engineering with Honors at Cornell UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Materials Science & Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Materials Science & Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
English
Github Skills (8)
material-design10
pymatgen10
material310
science10
io10
python10
material-components10
materials-informatics10
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
materialsproject/pymatgen
Jul 2019 - Aug 2019
Python Materials Genomics (pymatgen) is a robust materials analysis code that defines classes for structures and molecules with support for many electronic structure codes. It powers the Materials Project.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:33 commits, 4 PRs, 21 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Rees primarily contributed to the development of the `pymatgen` library, specifically focusing on input/output functionalities and advanced transformations. They implemented IO for ShengBTE CONTROL files and developed classes for transforming Pymatgen structures into supercells and randomly displaced supercells, as well as refactoring and fixing bugs. Their contributions demonstrate a focus on extending the library's capabilities for materials science analysis and simulations.
pymatgenpythonsciencematerials-sciencematerials-informatics
rees-c/rees-c.github.io
May 2020 - May 2025
Contributions:31 pushes, 1 branch in 5 years
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