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It was in equal parts scientific conference, family reunion, and straight up party. MARVEL’s final event, on 9th July in Lausanne, brought together current and former members of the community created by the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research, launched in 2014 and wrapping up its activities this year. And rather than just looking back and taking stock of the many things done, it became an opportunity to look forward – to the future of the field, and to new ways to keep the community together.

A two-week school on computational materials science supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and organized by MARVEL and ICTP attracted a record number of international participants (reposted from the ICTP website). 

Our NCCR was among the research organisations studied by  the INTERSECTIONS project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and focussing on how interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research is shaped by the interaction of research practices, knowledge cultures, and institutional policies. In particular, a doctoral study at ETH Zurich has used MARVEL as a case study to investigate how institutional norms, governance processes, and organisational practices shape collaborative research.

The MARVEL final report, covering the 12 years of the project, is available on the website. As mentioned by Nicola Marzari in the executive summary, the overall summary is that MARVEL had and still has exactly the right mission, drive, and ambition. It certainly showed, like many efforts worldwide, that materials can be discovered faster when theory, algorithms, high-performance computing, data, machine learning and experiments are tightly connected. Importantly, it kept pushing an agenda of open-source codes, open-access data, and of much needed verification efforts — often remarkably missing in a field that produces tens of thousands of papers per year. It produced new scientific knowledge, built digital tools used far beyond the consortium, trained a new generation of researchers, widened participation, and created lasting structures that strengthen Switzerland's position in computational materials science.

On 9 July in Lausanne, scientists, partners and industry leaders will mark the close of the NCCR MARVEL — a Swiss National Centre that helped move materials discovery from trial-and-error individual efforts toward predictive, open and AI-powered design.

The two-week college on “Materials Simulations in the Age of AI” aimed to bring together graduate students and early-career researchers from all over the world to learn and explore the state-of-the-art in computational materials science in the era of AI, and to forge the next generation of researchers in the field. It was organized by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and NCCR-MARVEL. The slides and lecture recordings are available online. And as says Edward Linscott in an interview, one of the most rewarding parts of the course was to watch MARVEL codes in action. 

With the support of the NCCR MARVEL, on 23 April 2026, the Ig Nobel Award Tour show was once more at EPFL. For the seventh time, the audience could have a good time of science and laughs, with Marc Abrahams and the Ig Nobel Prize winners Mariska Kret, Marcin Zajenkowski, and Chris McManus. It was about synchronization of hearts of new romantic partners, of narcissists being told they are intelligent, or of scrotal asymmetry in man and ancient sculpture.  If you missed it or if you would like to relive its best moments, the video is available. Discover too a portrait of Marc Abrahams in Le Temps.

Registration to the activities for girls and boys organized by the EPFL's Science Outreach Department in the coming fall are opening on Monday 18 May at 13:00 and will fill up quickly. With the objective of promoting MARVEL-related fields, especially toward girls, and encouraging them to choose scientific and engineering careers, MARVEL has supported throughout the years such activities, which will continue after the end of the NCCR. Don't miss the registrations for the science workshop Diamants, alu, caoutchouc, ils sont fous ces matériaux (girls 7-10 years old), the Maths en jeu workshops (girls and boys 8-15 years old), and the Coding club des filles (girls 11-15 years old)!

A working group of 22 European experts, including NCCR MARVEL Director Nicola Marzari, has reviewed and compiled the latest evidence on Europe's strategic position in the field of advances materials, and delivered a report that the EU's Chief Scientific Advisors have used to prepare recommendations for the European Commission. For Marzari, “the recognition of European leadership in first-principles simulations is very rewarding, as is the pressing need to generate high-quality computational datasets and train novel foundational models. It is also personally reassuring to see that this was the very forward-looking agenda that MARVEL initiated with its proposal and actions, from 2012 onwards”. Marzari was also a co-author of the Materials Science chapter of the PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) Scientific and Innovation Case for Computing in Europe 2026-2034, published on 29 April, that provides recommendations to enable AI- and HPC- driven materials discovery.

Over the last few months, we have been publishing in episodes a series of video interviews on the future of computational materials science. The whole series is now available on a dedicated page of the MARVEL website and through a YouTube playlist. Filmed during Psi-k 2025 in Lausanne, the interviews feature former and current MARVEL members and other world-renowned expert in the field who were in Lausanne for the conference. In each interview, they discuss the accomplishments of the last decades, the remaining challenges, the impact of AI and provide some advice to young scientists. With Giulia Galli, Georg Kresse, Peter Haynes, Zoë Holmes, Michele Ceriotti, Shobhana Narasimhan, Michele Kotiuga, Giovanni Pizzi, Viriginie de Mestral, Xingao Gong, Nicola Marzari.

The American Physical Society recently launched a new journal for AI and machine learning in the physical sciences called PRX Intelligence. Former MARVEL PI Anatole von Lilienfeld is the chief editor, MARVEL director Nicola Marzari is one of the deputy editors, and MARVEL deputy director Michele Ceriotti is one of the associated editors. At the APS Global Physics Summit in March, the editors shared their vision for this new journal in video interview "AI Meets Physics: Inside the New Journal PRX Intelligence".

Registration to the science summer camps organized by the EPFL's Science Outreach Department in August 2026 are opening on Monday 24 March at 12:30 and will fill up quickly. With the objective of promoting MARVEL-related fields, especially toward girls, and encouraging them to choose scientific and engineering careers, MARVEL has supported throughout the years the summer camp in chemistry for girls and boys 11-13 years old (taking place in 2026 from 3 to 7 August) and the summer camp on materials science Matériaux super géniaux for girls 11-13 years old (in 2026, from 10 to 14 August).