Rate My Professor Kenneth Park

Kenneth Park is an Associate Professor of Physics and Co-Graduate Program Director in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Baylor University. He received his B.A. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988, M.A. in Physics from the University of Rochester in 1990, and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Rochester in 1993. After completing his Ph.D., he served as a postdoctoral researcher with Professor Kamil Klier in the Department of Chemistry at Lehigh University. In 1997, Park joined the faculty at Baylor University as an Assistant Professor of Physics. He was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in 2004. Additionally, he held the position of Director of Graduate Study from January 2005 to May 2006 and conducted sabbatical research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from June 2004 to January 2005. He continues to collaborate with researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Louisiana State University.

Park's research focuses on surface atomic and electronic structures and their interactions with adsorbates, particularly on single crystal TiO2 surfaces. His experimental studies employ Scanning Tunneling Microscopy to examine defect formation, atomic structures, local stoichiometry, and chemical properties of nanometer-scale surface defects. In recent years, he has utilized all-electron density functional theory (DFT) in Wien2k to explore the electronic, thermodynamic, and mechanical properties of TiO2 polymorphs through Hubbard-corrected DFT methods. His research spans computational solid state physics, including materials modeling for high-pressure phase stability and transitions, and experimental solid state physics, covering surface defects and nanoparticles on TiO2, alkali metal adsorption on MoS2, and metal-organic interfaces like metallo-phthalocyanine thin films. Park received the ACS-PRF Summer Research Fellowship from June 1 to August 2, 2002. Notable publications include "Alleviating Projection-Space Sensitivity in DFT+U via Renormalized U" by Manjula Raman and Kenneth Park (arXiv:2603.07340, 2026); "Stability of TiO2 phases studied using r2SCAN in the Hubbard-corrected density functional theory" by Jared Pohlmann et al. (Molecules 30, 560, 2025); "Revisiting DFT+U Calculations of TiO2 and the Effect of the Local-projection Size" by Kenneth T. Park et al. (AIP Advances 14, 065114, 2024, Editor’s Pick); and "Probing Structure of Cross-Linked (1×2) Rutile TiO2 (110)" by Ke Zhu et al. (J. Phys. Chem. C 120, 15257, 2016).