what I do (in laymen's terms)

So Academic Jungle has posted a comment asking for theoretical/computational scientists to post something about their work so that everyone can get a general idea of what we do and why we do it.  I am trying to put it in layman's terms so that when my mom finds out I have a blog she can understand it too.

I study materials using tools that are call "first principle" methods because they are derived from basic physical principles (quantum mechanics).  With these tools we can study many (but by no means all) of the properties of a material that anyone would be interested in.  However, with everything we do there is a trade off between the accuracy of what we are studying and the amount of computing power used so there is constant progress on developing tools that increase the efficiency of  these methods as well as look at new material properties.  What I have been doing at my current post-doc is to use these methods to look interfaces of materials in a manner that hasn't been done for the complexity of system we are interested in (materials used in transistors).  However, as I progress further and further into my field I am becoming more interested in and more active in developing these tools.

So this leads to two things: the first is how I came to be in my field and the second is since I am job hunting for my second post-doc what topics I am looking for.

For the first topic, I have always been interested in computers and quantum mechanics (the theory part).  In fact I was a bit of an odd duck as a graduate student who wanted to be a theory person in an entirely experimental department.  Luckily two things happened at about the same time.  A Mechanical Engineer Prof started moving to the physics department doing theoretical physics and doing "first principle methods" and he happened to have money and was looking for a physics grad student.  So the field sorta found me.  Then my first post doc I was looking for any job in the field either in the same state I was in at the time (where my then Fiancee was) or in Europe.  I only really found a position in France that lucky was doing some really interesting things modeling materials for electronics.

The way I have been looking for post-docs at the moment is using the web-forum for my field that is run by EU funding but that research groups in the US use too.  This gives me lots of options of problems to solve.  Most of the problems I am interested in are a combination of developing code (a program) that fills in gaps in applications and then using the new code to study a problem that has been un-solvable before.  Because there two groups of theorists in my field, those who work on applying existing techniques to novel systems and those who develop new tools to solve usually well known problems.

So that is a brief overview of what I do.  I hope it makes sense, if anyone has questions feel free to ask.