Communication

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). 

During the Psi-k 2025 that took place from 25 to 28 August 2025 in Lausanne, we interviewed several MARVEL members or top experts in computational materials science and asked them how they see the future of the field. Over the past few months we have been publishing the resulting interviews that present a range of diverse perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that await the community. The interviews are also an opportunity to assess the impact of MARVEL and its impact on the field overall. This month we complete the series with the interviews with MARVEL members Giovanni Pizzi from PSI and Virginie de Mestral from ETH Zurich, with the Funan University professor Xingao Gong, and with MARVEL director Nicola Marzari. All the interviews are collected in a playlist on the Materials Cloud YouTube channel.   

Three new collections of portraits of women professors in Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics are now on display across EPFL’s School of Basic Sciences, ten years after the initial installation in Materials Science. Come and discover this new opportunity to showcase role models and encourage young women to choose a career in science.

We are happy to announce that Lisa Ruth Andreozzi (Sapienza, Roma), Natalie E. Hooven (Univ. Wisconsin, Madison), and Ruth Mora Soto (Univ. Politècnica de Catalunya) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the November 2025 call. The three women will join MARVEL labs for a 3 to 6 month research project — congratulations!

The MARVEL community gathered in Grindelwald for the final MARVEL Review and Retreat to reflect on the program’s 12-year journey and celebrate the connections, collaborations, and sense of community that have grown over the years. From lively project sessions and poster discussions to a pub quiz and spontaneous gatherings, the retreat offered a unique mix of science, friendship, and reflection, celebrating both the NCCR’s achievements and the lasting impact it will have on participants and the wider research community.

Two more interviews filmed during the Psi-k 2025 that took place from 25 to 28 August in Lausanne, presenting a range of diverse perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that await the community. The interviews are also an opportunity to assess the impact of MARVEL and its impact on the field overall. Here are the interviews to Michele Kotiuga, a former MARVEL member who is now with the company Materials Design, and Indian professor Shobhana Narasimhan from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru.

Do you communicate about your research with the public? And do you use AI when doing so, or not? These are some of the questions the SNSF project "Science Communication in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" at the University of Zurich is trying to answer. Thus they are inviting researchers across all disciplines to participate to an anonymous online survey.

The Materials Cloud Archive has become even more accessible and easier to use for scientists. The repository for materials science supported by NCCR MARVEL has been integrated with Renku, the open-source platform for data science developed by the Swiss Data Science Center. The integration allows users to access the Materials Cloud Archive without installing the AiiDA workflow on their local system and without a previous knowledge of how AiiDA works, two factors that represented a barrier to access to the Materials Cloud for many scientists.

During the Psi-k 2025 that took place from 25 to 28 August in Lausanne, we interviewed several top experts in computational materials science and asked them how they see the future of the field. The resulting video interviews will be published over the course of the next weeks on our website, presenting a range of diverse perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that await the community. The interviews are also an opportunity to assess the impact of MARVEL and its impact on the field overall. Here are the interviews to Peter Haynes from Imperial College London, who was also the chair of Psi-k 2025, MARVEL member and EPFL professor Zoë Holmes, and Michele Ceriotti, EPFL professor and deputy director of MARVEL. 

MARVEL and EPFL's Science Outreach Department are pleased to announce equal opportunity initiatives targeting girls and boys. Registration for the science workshop Diamants, alu, caoutchouc, ils sont fous ces matériaux (girls 7-10 years old) and for the Coding club des filles in the French part of Switzerland have opened on 17 November and fill up quickly.

During the Psi-k 2025 that took place from 25 to 28 August in Lausanne, we interviewed several top experts in computational materials science and asked them how they see the future of the field. The resulting video interviews will be published over the course of the next weeks on our website, presenting a range of diverse perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that await the community. The interviews are also an opportunity to assess the impact of MARVEL and its impact on the field overall. We begin with the interviews to Giulia Galli from the University of Chicago, and Georg Kresse from the University of Vienna. 

Psi-k 2025, the largest conference worldwide for materials theory and prediction, electronic structure and ab-initio simulations, took place from 25 to 28 August at the SwissTech Convention center on the EPFL Campus in Lausanne. It attracted over 1,300 participants who could attend 345 talks overall, with 6 plenary talks, 35 symposia organized in 6 parallel sessions, and a poster session including over 760 posters. MARVEL Director and EPFL professor Nicola Marzari gave the opening plenary lecture  on 25 August. The event was a huge success and showcased the growth and livelihood of the computational materials science community.