Communication

The #NCCRWomen are back. The campaign is relaunched with portraits and interviews of more women researchers in Switzerland and more exciting science. Meet them on Twitter and Instagram, starting with #NCCRWomen Principal Investigators of MARVEL, Clémence Corminboeuf, Sara Bonella, Ana Akrap, Sereina Riniker and Marta Gibert.

A team of NCCR MARVEL members participated in Paul Scherrer Institute’s “Tag der offenen Tür,” or Open Doors Day, on October 23rd, explaining magnons and phonons and the use of supercomputers to study them to children and adults alike. The event, hosted every five years, drew some 15,000 people.

Dr. Giovanni Pizzi, now senior researcher in the group of Nicola Marzari and project leader of NCCR MARVEL's Pillar 3, Digital Infrastructure of Open Simulations and Data, is starting a new position as head of the "Materials Software and Data" group of the Laboratory for Materials Simulations at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI).

Giuseppe Carleo arrived at EPFL in September 2020 as assistant professor and is head of the Computational Quantum Science Laboratory in the School of Basic Sciences. He has joined NCCR MARVEL in phase III as project leader of the Bonus project Leveraging Quantum Computers and Algorithms for Materials Discovery.

Psi-k 2022 will welcome from this Monday, August 22 more than 1,200 participants at the SwissTech Convention Center for the sixth edition of its general conference gathering the entire Psi-k community. This is a worldwide network of researchers self-organized into a charity and working on the advancement of first-principles computational materials science. Such success highlights the global impact of this burgeoning field, says Professor Nicola Marzari, head of Theory and simulation of materials at EPFL and Materials simulations at the Paul Scherrer Institute, and Chairperson of Psi-k 2022.   

Mathieu Luisier, professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETHZ and project leader of the Continued Support, Advanced Simulation Methods at NCCR MARVEL, has won an Advanced Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to continue the development of technology computer aided design (TCAD) tools that integrate the physics needed to design next-generation nanoscale devices.

We are happy to announce that Arianna Cantarella (University of Parma) was granted an INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowship after the April 2022 call. She will join a MARVEL lab for a 6-month Master's research project — congratulations!

The developers of AiiDA have released AiiDA v2.0. The culmination of more than two years of work, the update focused on re-designing the codebase to make it more performant, user-friendly and maintainable, with minimal changes to the API.

Registrations for the 2022-2023 edition of the mathematics workshops Maths en jeu open on 2 May 2022. These workshops are taking place at EPFL and target girls and boys 8 to 15 years old. They are part of the equal opportunities actions of the EPFL Science outreach department supported by MARVEL.

NCCR MARVEL PhD students Jigyasa Nigam and Miriam Pougin were among the young researchers taking part in the "Thematic day for high school students" organized by EPFL's Education Outreach Department on April 7 at the gymnasium in Thun. The event, whose theme was "Destination Innovation," gathered more than twenty researchers from the EPFL community. Speaking on topics from cryptography to space exploration and using supercomputers to design the materials of the future, they set out to enhance the visibility of EPFL study programs and communicate the range of opportunities open to students across Switzerland. 

The Swiss National Science Foundation has awarded MARVEL full funding plus the highest possible bonus for its third and final phase, which will run from May 2022 until April 2026.

Anirudh Raju Natarajan, whose research interests are in the computational design and discovery of advanced engineering materials, will join MARVEL in the upcoming phase III of the NCCR. Recently appointed professor at EPFL, Anirudh set up the laboratory of materials design and simulation (MADES) earlier this year and is looking forward to advancing the design and discovery of the next generation of high-performance engineering materials. You can read more about him in the text and interview below.