Dr. Seán Kavanagh is an Assistant Professor in Simulation of Energy Materials, at the Department of Chemistry in the University of Cambridge. He earned his undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin in his native Ireland, PhD at University College London and Imperial College London, and a Fellowship at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Seán was awarded the 2024 IOP and APS Computational Physics thesis prizes, the 2025 RSC Energy Sector Thesis Prize and named a 2025 JPhys Energy Emerging Leader. He serves as an Editorial Board Member for Physical Review Materials, an Assessor for Innovate UK and a Modelling & Simulation Steering Group Member at the Henry Royce Institute.

Seán heads the Simulation of Advanced Materials (SAM) lab, studying defects and disorder in materials, including methodological/software developments – such as the doped and ShakeNBreak defect modelling toolkits – and machine-learning approaches.