Professor Julie Staunton

University of Warwick, UK
Julie Staunton is a professor at the Department of Physics, University of Warwick in the U.K. and heads its Theoretical Physics Group and is also the inaugural Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Modelling of Heterogeneous Systems (HetSys) at Warwick which recruits students from across the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering to develop computational materials modelling skills. Her own research interests are in magnetic materials modelling and alloy physics with close interaction with experimental groups.  Ab initio materials modelling based on density functional theory (DFT) is typically confined to treatments of materials at low temperatures. Julie Staunton and co-workers’ extension of DFT, the disordered local moment (DLM) theory addresses this shortcoming for magnetic materials by incorporating the effects of magnetic excitations. Her work has led to a quantitative theoriy that can describe both rare earth (RE) and transition metal (TM) magnetism at finite temperatures and in applied fields producing input for further atomistic and micromagnetic modelling.