Simon Billinge

Biography

Simon Billinge is a USCB Materials Science Professor and Director of California Nanosystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara. He got his BA in Metallurgy and Materials Science at Oxford University, followed by his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Billinge spent 18 years as a professor of applied physics, applied mathematics, and materials science at Columbia University after 13 years as a professor at Michigan State University. Dr. Billinge has published more than 350 papers in scholarly journals.He also held a joint position of Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory between 2008 and 2022.

He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Neutron Scattering Society of America, a former Fulbright and Sloan fellow and has earned a number of awards including, in 2025, the Gregori Aminoff prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of sciences, and the Innovation in Materials Characterization Award of the Materials Research Society. He was honored in 2011 for contributions to the nation as an immigrant by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.  He is Section Editor of Acta Crystallographica Section A: Advances and Foundations. He regularly chairs and participates in reviews of major facilities and federally funded programs.

Research

Professor Billinge has more than 25 years of experience developing and applying techniques to study local structure in materials advanced x-ray and neutron diffraction techniques to study local-structure property relationships of disordered crystals and nanocrystals, and their role in the properties of diverse materials relevant to, for example, energy, catalysis, environmental remediation, and pharmaceuticals. He also employs neutron and electron-scattering methods, as well as advanced computation and analysis, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and graph theoretic methods.