Bio

Milena began her science education at the University of Belgrade, where she got a B.S. in chemistry. She continued her education at the University of Colorado Boulder, earning a Ph.D. in chemical physics. Before arriving at NC State, she conducted postdoctoral research at Princeton University.

Area(s) of Expertise

Quantum materials are at the forefront of the next technological revolution. However, there are a limited number of known quantum materials, and the quantum behavior usually arises only at low temperatures and high pressures. My research uses a chemistry point of view to design new quantum materials and to find access to quantum behavior under milder conditions, such as room temperature and pressure.

Publications

• Metastable Materials with Linear Chains: Photoinduced Chemical Reactions in K 2 X 2 (X = S, Se, Te) , The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (2026)
• Photochemical Reactions in A 2 X 2 (A = Na, Rb and X = S, Se, Te): A Path toward Nonclassical Bonds in Metastable Compounds , Inorganic Chemistry (2026)
• Chemical enhancement of superconductivity in LaRu 3 Si 2 with mode-selective coupling between kagome phonons and flat bands , Physical Review Research (2025)
• Materials Expert-Artificial Intelligence for materials discovery , Communications Materials (2025)
• Recipe for Flat Bands in Pyrochlore Materials: A Chemist’s Perspective , Journal of the American Chemical Society (2025)
• Successive Orthorhombic Distortions in Kagome Metals by Molecular Orbital Formation , Advanced Materials (2025)
• Accessing bands with extended quantum metric in kagome Cs 2 Ni 3 S 4 through soft chemical processing , Science Advances (2024)
• Conformational Analysis of Swallowtail Motifs in Porphyrins , The Journal of Organic Chemistry (2024)
• Designing giant Hall response in layered topological semimetals , Nature Communications (2024)
• Synthesis of a model phyllobilin bearing an optical marker , New Journal of Chemistry (2024)

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