Iain McCulloch’s research involves the design, synthesis and development of semiconducting small molecules and polymers for use as transistors for display, solar cells and most recently biological sensing. His efforts have focused on the understanding and control of microstructure and energy levels in conjugated aromatic semiconducting polymers and the subsequent impact on device properties. This has resulted in several commercial products including lithographic formulations and printable semiconducting inks. His research continues to broaden in scope, including making important contributions in organic photovoltaics, where he is exploring new electron acceptor materials, doping effects, and fundamental optical absorption phenomena. In addition, he is developing biological sensing and electrochemical devices, which have resulted in the first demonstration of solid-state optical semiconducting sensors for measurement of cations, as well as fundamental molecular design rules of semiconducting polymers for organic electrochemical transistors. Most recently, he has discovered that organic semiconducting nanoparticle blends are efficient photocatalysts for the production of hydrogen from water and the reduction of carbon dioxide.

Building systems design and integration; radiant heating and cooling sensors and systems; desiccant dehumidification, geothermal systems; heat pumps; renewable energy; optimization of energy systems; exergy analysis; building materials; thermodynamics and heat transfer

Attosecond science, high-­harmonic and attosecond‐pulse generation and application. High-­field physics, high-­power lasers, relativistic laser‐plasma interaction, synchrotron­‐type intense x‐ray radiation from solids, laser­‐driven particle acceleration. Ultrafast and nonlinear optics, few-­cycle optical pulse generation, optical parametric chirped pulse amplification, femtosecond laser filamentation, nonlinear fiber optics. Quantum optics, entanglement of quantum states, biphoton states in spontaneous parametric light scattering.

High-sensitivity detection of pollutants and environmental contaminants (CO, NO, etc); combustion and aerodynamic control by lasers and microwaves, and plasma based energy conversion.

The design and development of privacy-preserving and secure systems, including the domains of (1) privacy-enhancing technologies such as anonymous communication and statistical data privacy, (2) adversarial machine learning, and (3) Internet/network security

Research is focused on bio-inspired approaches to the design of civil and renewable energy materials and structures and advancing the automated robotic fabrication as an enabling technology to thread such designs with novel and enhanced performance characteristics.

Predictive computational simulation and modeling of multi-physics turbulent flows. Integration of computational science, data science, and uncertainty quantification. High-performance algorithms for large-scale heterogeneous parallel computing. Application areas of interest include combustion energy conversion for electricity generation and transportation (including pollutant emissions and the environmental impacts of combustion), offshore wind energy, and fusion energy.

Climate adaptation design and engineering, particularly in coastal urban regions

Thermoelectrics, fundamental studies of superconductivity, novel superconducting and magnetic materials, topological insulators, Dirac-Weyl metals