Amalya C. Johnson

Hello! And welcome to my website.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Toyota Research Institute working on the Accelerated Materials Design and Discovery Team. Here, I use multi-modal materials data to build multi-modal large language models that can understand and reason on materials science problems. I’m interested in developing software to accelerate scientific research and care deeply about data quality and curation of scientific data.

In 2025, I earned my PhD from the Stanford Materials Science and Engineering department. My dissertation focused on the thermal and excitonic properties of atomically thin or “two-dimensional” (2D) materials. At Stanford, I was a Graduate Fellow in the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy. I was a recipient of a US Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research Award, and conducted the end of my doctoral research at the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Find more details on my research here, my first first-author paper here, and all of my publications here.

I earned my Bachelors in Physics from Columbia University, where I was a 4-year starter and senior captain of the Women’s Soccer Team. These days, I spend my saturdays watching NCAA Women’s Soccer, the NWSL, the EPL, or LaLiga.