May 12, 2010
By Robin Donovan

            Drs. Sergio Ulloa (left) and Luis Dias da Silva

Luis Dias da Silva visited Athens for the first time during spring, when flowering trees and an explosion of greenery enliven the town. As an international fellow, he appreciated both the area and its residents. “It is a small town, but it has a lot of cultural activities going on. . . .I was very impressed with the international community here.”

His first connection to Ohio University and NQPI came from a conversation with Dr. Sergio Ulloa, an Ohio University physics professor and NQPI member. The men met in 2002 during Ulloa’s visit to the Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil, where Dr. Dias was a postdoctoral fellow.

Dias visited Athens for six months in 2003 to collaborate with Ulloa and Dr. Alexander Govorov, also an NQPI member. He headed back to Brazil, but returned to OU in 2004 as a postdoctoral fellow, working closely with Ulloa and Dr. Nancy Sandler of NQPI.

As he adapted to life in Athens, Dias found a hint of home while working with NQPI members. “Professors Ulloa and Sandler are both from Latin America, so our relationship was very close,” he said.

Dias left OU in 2007 after accepting a positions with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee. These days, he is looking forward to returning to Brazil. He recently accepted an assistant professorship at the University of São Paulo, Brazil’s largest research university.

Dias studies theoretical condensed matter physics and works with computational studies of nanostructures, including computer simulations of electron-electron interaction effects. His recent publications include collaborations with NQPI members such as “Tunable pseudogap Kondo effect and quantum phase transitions in Aharonov-Bohm interferometers” (Physical Review Letters, 102 166806, 2009) and “Many-body electronic structure and Kondo properties of cobalt-porphyrin molecules” (Physical Review B 80 155443, 2009).