Rate My Professor de Sousa Oliveira

Laura de Sousa Oliveira is an Assistant Professor of Inorganic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wyoming, where she also holds the position of UW Derecho Professor and serves as an Adjunct Professor in the School of Computing and affiliated faculty with the Nuclear Energy Research Center. She earned her B.S. in 2010 from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, her Ph.D. in 2017 from the University of California, Riverside, and completed her postdoctoral research from 2017 to 2020 at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. Following her postdoctoral work, she joined the University of Wyoming, establishing the Computational Design of Inorganic Materials Lab.

In her laboratory, de Sousa Oliveira employs computational tools and strategies to investigate fundamental chemical and physical processes, advancing scientific knowledge, improving technologies, and designing next-generation smart materials. Her research interests include thermoelectric materials, thermal transport in nuclear fuels such as UO2, water purification and desalination membranes, and porous coordination compounds like metal-organic frameworks. She has secured major funding, including a five-year $874,296 U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Program grant in 2023 to study thermoelectric performance in two-dimensional metal-organic frameworks, an NSF team award in 2021 for new membrane materials, School of Energy Resources funding in 2025 for multi-scale thermal transport modeling of UO2 with fission products, and University of Wyoming seed funding for artificial intelligence research. Her scholarly contributions include two 2025 publications in the Journal of the American Chemical Society co-authored with John Hoberg and Bruce Parkinson, such as on covalent integration of polymers and porous organic frameworks; Benchmark Investigation of SCC-DFTB against Standard and Range-Separated Density Functional Approximations in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation (2024); and Super-Suppression of Long-Wavelength Phonons in Nanostructured Half-Heusler Thermoelectrics in Nanomaterials (2024). These works underscore her influence in computational materials science and energy technologies.