There is significant interest in multifunctional materials, such as multiferroics, which combine simultaneous responses to electric, magnetic, and strain fields. Potential applications include new power efficient electronics and ultra-fast information processing devices. To date, most of the multiferroics that have been studied are complex oxide materials. Despite the exciting fundamental discoveries emanating from research on these materials, their multiferroic performance is not yet adequate for use in practical applications. In this project, the investigators propose to systematically study complex fluoride materials as alternatives to complex oxides because the different physical origins of the multiferroic effects in fluorides can potentially enhance the multiferroic response. The research will consist of a synergistic collaboration between computational and experimental researchers. The computational effort will predict the most likely materials to have desired multiferroic properties, and the experimental portion will synthesize and characterize the suggested materials. In turn, the experimental results will be used to improve the accuracy of the calculations, which ultimately will lead to an efficient optimization of the design of the new materials.