Bio:
Spanier joined the Drexel faculty in 2003 after a postdoctoral fellowship in physical chemistry with Professor Hongkun Park at Harvard University and completed his PhD in the group of Professor Irving P. Herman. He investigates the structure, physical, electronic and dielectric properties of emergent solid state quantum materials, striving to advance the state-of-the-art in energy-efficient materials and devices. He and his research group probe the interactions of light with matter, including inelastic light scattering revealing lattice, electronic and magnetic phase stability. They investigate the structure ferroic and multiferroic solids, and electromechanical, magnetoelectric, energy-, charge- and spin-storage properties.
Since November 2018 he has served as Interim Head, and beginning in 2020, Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics. He served as Associate Dean in the College of Engineering, where he led development of the College’s 2013-18 Strategic Plan. From 2011-17 he was Director of the University’s Centralized Research Facilities. Prior to completing the PhD, he held research and technical staff positions at the US Naval Research Laboratory in physical acoustics and in the semiconductor device industry, and he was a visiting scientist at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, in 2001.
Spanier is an APS Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2007, he was an Office of Naval Research (ONR) Summer Faculty Fellow in 2010 and received the Distinguished Service Award from the Louis R Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation in 2013, and he was named a Louis and Bessie Stein Family Fellow in 2013. In 2014 he was awarded a Japan Trust International Research Cooperation Fellowship from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology to work as a visiting scientist at Fujitsu Laboratories, Ltd. Professor Spanier participated, by invitation, in the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering, at UC Riverside in 2014.
Selected Publications:
Chen, D., S. Nisnevich, L. Wu, Z. Gu, J. Carroll, Y. Jiang, C. J. G. Meyers, K. Coleman, B. M. Hanrahan, L. W. Martin, I. Grinberg, J. E. Spanier. Colossal and tunable dielectric tunability in domain-engineered barium strontium titanate. Nature Communications 16, 8486 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-63449-4
Ghanbari, R., H. KP, K. Patel, H. Zhou, T. Zhou, R. Lui, L. Wu, A. Khandelwal, K. J. Crust, S. Hazra, J. Carroll, C. J. G. Meyers, J. Wang, S. Prosandeev, H. Qiao, Y. Kim, Y. Nabei, M. Chi, D. Sun, N. Balke, M. Holt, V. Gopalan, J. E. Spanier, D. A. Muller, R. Xu. Strain-induced lead-free morphotropic phase boundary. Nature Communications 16, 7766 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-63041-w
Colossal electromechanical response in antiferroelectric-based nanoscale multilayers," M. Acharya, L. Alaerts, E. Banyas, D. Kang, F. Ricci, H. Pan, B. Hanrahan, J.E. Spanier, J.B. Neaton, G. Hautier, L.W. Martin, Advanced Materials, 37(14), 2419690 (2025).
Clamping enables enhanced electromechanical responses in antiferroelectric thin films, H. Pan, M. Zhu, E. Banyas, L. Alaerts, M. Acharya, H. Zhang, J. Kim, X. Chen, X. Huang, M. Xu, I. Harris, Z. Tian, F. Ricci, B. Hanrahan, J.E. Spanier, G. Hautier, J.M. LeBeau, J.B. Neaton, L.W. Martin, Nature Materials, 23 May (2024).
Accuracy and limitations of the bond polarizability model in modeling of Raman scattering from molecular dynamics simulations," A. Paul, M. Rubenstein, A. Ruffino, S. Masiuk, J.E. Spanier, I. Grinberg, Journal of Chemical Physics, 161, 064305 (2024).
A predictive theory for domain walls in oxide ferroelectrics based on interatomic interactions and its implications for collective material properties, A. Samanta, S. Yadav, Z. Gu, C. J. G. Meyers, L. Wu, D. Chen, S. Pandya, R.A. York, L.W. Martin, J.E. Spanier, I. Grinberg, Advanced Materials (2022) 34(7).
Direct observation of shift and ballistic photovoltaic currents, A. M. Burger, R. Agarwal, A. Aprelev, E. Schruba, A. Gutierrez-Perez, V. M. Fridkin and J. E. Spanier, Science Advances 5, eaau5588 (2019).
Resonant domain wall-enhanced tunable microwave ferroelectrics, Z. Gu, S. Pandya, A. Samanta, S. Liu, G. Xiao, C.J.G. Meyers, A.R. Damodaran, H. Barak, A. Dasgupta, S. Saremi, A. Polemi, L. Wu, A. Podpirka, A. Will-Cole, C.J. Hawley, P.K. Davies, R.A. York, I. Grinberg, L.W. Martin, and J.E. Spanier, Nature 560, 622–627 (2018).
Mesoscopic free path of nonthermalized photogenerated carriers in a ferroelectric insulator, Z. Gu, D. Imbrenda, A. L. Bennett-Jackson, M. Falmbigl, A. Podpirka, T. C. Parker, D. Shreiber, M. P. Ivill, V. M. Fridkin, and J. E. Spanier, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 096601, (2017).
A Comprehensive Multiphonon Spectral Analysis in MoS2, T. Livneh and J. E. Spanier, 2D Materials 2, 035003 (2015).