Biography

Ashkan Salamat is an assistant professor with UNLV's Department of Physics and Astronomy. Salamat is also the director of the Nevada Etreme Conditions Laboratory (NEXCL), a multidisciplinary center that explores fundamental experimental, computational, and engineering problems of materials under high pressure.

The central theme of Salamat’s research uses unique thermodynamic pathways to unlock remarkable new chemistries or drive physical phenomenon that would be unachievable by any other means, leading to materials that do not exist naturally in nature. This is often accomplished in the laboratory by using extreme scales of pressure, temperature, and time.

Prior to joining UNLV, Salamat was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, researching warm dense hydrogen. In 2019, Salamat was one of just 46 university professors nationwide – and the first from UNLV – to earn an Early Career Award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.