Projects
Last main updates to this page was made in 2022. More recent details are in LinkedIn and in my resume.
OQMD
OQMD is a database containing computational data of more than a million inorganic crystalline materials. I have been the main developer and maintainer at OQMD.org since 2019. I transitioned OQMD from on-premises hosting to a fully-fledged, scalable cloud server in early 2022 with a deployment DevOps architecture as shown below.
My main achievements as the developer and maintainer at OQMD.org are listed here inside this collapsed section (expands upon click):
Transitioned OQMD.org from traditional, on-premises hosting to a fully-fledged Google Cloud Platform deployment for less than $230/month
Decreased latency to less than than half of the on-premises server in mostly static pages
Decreased latency to less than 25% of the on-premises server in web pages which are computationally intense at server-side due to dedicated MySQL instance
Increased the maximum number of simultaneous users (without resulting in a timeout error) by 300% compared to on-premises server
No downtime during upgrades due to the new CI/CD pipeline including container orchestration
Significantly increased website and database security with timely updates to the API and dependent packages, deployment of GCP Cloud Armour firewall, and enforcement of SSL/TLS certificates
Redistribution of computational load to dedicated static, MySQL, and Kubernetes instances largely avoided the long queues to share the resources in on-premises hosting (eg: automated REST API queries rarely result in server crashes now)
Upgraded the API's critical dependencies such as Django (1.8 to 2.2) and Python (2 to 3)
Co-developed, deployed, and actively maintained a new REST API
Implemented CI/CD components such as Github Actions and CodeQL
Significantly enhanced security and reliability of the website by adding mandated SSL/TLS certificate, automated uptime checks, and a firewall to block bots based on access frequency
Developed and deployed a Handle Persistent Identifier system with backup data served from separate servers to avoid "link-rot" issues
Released multiple versions of the database, API, and the REST API over three years
Managed and regularly monitored the development and production versions of the database and the corresponding website
Trained students to develop and manage production-level database systems
Added Redis-based caching of custom user inputs to support conflict-less JSMOL molecular visualization during simultaeous accesses
Redesigned the user interface for better readability and lower latency
Added structured data to the webpages in accordance with schema.org specifications
OPTIMADE REST API
I co-authored the OPTIMADE REST API specification for materials database data transfer (published in the journal Scientific Data) and implemented the same in OQMD materials database using Django REST Framework.
Materials Design & Discovery
My projects in Materials Design & Discovery are summarized below. All of these projects include both material simulations and data science to various levels inside a streamlined workflow with one or more iterations involving feedback.
Discovery of High-Dielectrics from Statistical Modeling & Cross-database Design
Multi-objective Optimization In Materials Science with Adaptive Design
Multi-fidelity Analysis of Material Properties with Co-Kriging to Identify Misclassified Semiconductors
Manuscript under final author review
Discovery of Bridge Material for 2D Inks from a Streamlined Design Workflow
Manuscript under preparation
Exploration of Material Selection Searchspace with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)
Scripts yet to be made public
Graph Features for Small-data modeling via Transfer Learning
Scripts and a UI web-portal to be made public
Materials Graph Database
Building a Materials Graph DB Using Ontology & Graph DBMS
(Cypher & Neo4j) OR (Protege & Plotly Dash)
This project is currently under active development
NU Coding Club
I designed, created and deployed the NU Coding Club website using WordPress at Northwestern's hosting servers.
Non-technical Experiences
Chicago ICO volunteer
Volunteer at Sierra Club's Chicago ICO unit for 1.5 years. The responsibilities included engaging middle to high school students in outdoors activities & team-building, and organizing trips & fundraisers.
TA Experience
Did TA work for 2 courses at Dept. of Materials Science at Northwestern University, USA. The responsibilities included teaching students, conducting hands-on training & lab sessions, grading exams and assessing students' performance in assignments, helping students with discussions during weekly tutorial sessions, monitoring exams, etc.
MSE 318: Materials Selection
MSE 381: Materials For Energy-Efficient Technology