Rate My Professor Aditya Sood

Aditya Sood is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with a joint appointment in the Princeton Materials Institute at Princeton University, a position he has held since 2023. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University in 2017, an M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University in 2015, and a B.Tech. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 2011. Prior to his appointment at Princeton, Sood served as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Scientist at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), affiliated with Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, from 2018 to 2022. He also held a brief position as Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 2018.

Sood's research interests center on nanoscale thermal transport, nanoelectronics, and ultrafast science, with a focus on dynamic energy transport in materials and their responses to external stimuli on fast timescales. His studies address controlling heat flow at the atomic scale, imaging short-lived transient states in materials, modulating ion transport in energy-storage materials, and creating non-equilibrium states through ultrafast excitation, with applications in energy-efficient computing, energy harvesting, and storage. Sood utilizes time-resolved X-ray and electron scattering at national laboratories for experimental investigations of interfacial charge and energy transport, light-matter interactions, and electrically-triggered transformations. Key publications include "Universal phase dynamics in VO₂ switches revealed by ultrafast operando diffraction" (Science, 2021), "Bidirectional phonon emission in two-dimensional heterostructures triggered by ultrafast charge transfer" (Nature Nanotechnology, 2023), "Engineering thermal transport across layered graphene-MoS₂ superlattices" (ACS Nano, 2021), "Electrochemical ion insertion from the atomic to the device scale" (Nature Reviews Materials, 2021), and "Hidden phonon highways promote photoinduced interlayer energy transfer in twisted transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructures" (Science Advances, 2024). He has received the ACS PRF Doctoral New Investigator Award (2023), Princeton Engineering Commendation for Outstanding Teaching (2023), MRS Postdoctoral Award (2022), AVS Nanoscale Science & Technology Division Early Career Award (2022), LCLS Young Investigator Award (2021), and MRS Gold Graduate Student Award (2017).