Communication

Nicola Marzari, head of the Theory and Simulation of Materials laboratory at EFPL and director of NCCR MARVEL, has just published a review of electronic-structure methods as an “Insight” piece in Nature Materials. The article, written with Andrea Ferretti of CNR–Instituto Nanoscienze and Chris Wolverton of Northwestern University, provides an overview of these methods, discusses their application to the prediction of materials properties, and examines different strategies used to target the broader goals of materials design and discovery. Looking ahead, the authors consider emerging challenges in the predictive accuracy of the calculations, and in addressing the real-life complexity of materials and devices. They also stress the importance of the computational infrastructures that support such research, and how the planning for funding these and the supporting career models is only just beginning to emerge.

We are very pleased to announce that the Materials Cloud platform developed by the NCCR MARVEL is now an official repository for Open Research Europe.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of women obtaining the right to vote in Switzerland, the 22 active NCCRs have joined forces in a campaign showing how in these 50 years women have come to occupy a central place in research in almost all scientific fields. During this campaign, these female researchers will be showing you who they are, what they do and why they are doing it.

Meet the NCCR women! To celebrate the 50th anniversary of women obtaining the right to vote in Switzerland, the 22 active NCCRs have joined forces in a campaign showing how in these 50 years women have come to occupy a central place in research in almost all scientific fields.

The Réseau romand de mentoring pour femmes is opening the call for its 11th edition. It is a mentoring program for women researchers from universities in the French speaking part of Switzerland and the EPFL, aiming at encouraging women to pursue an academic career and facilitating their integration into the scientific community.

The AiiDA team has been granted computing resources from the Fenix Research Infrastructure in the third PRACE-ICEI call for proposals. Having gained 84 CPUs, 1 TB RAM memory, 2.5 TB storage, and 40 TB in archive space from the CSCS Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in the call, the team will be able to strengthen high-performance and high-throughput computing research through a more powerful deployment of the AiiDAlab web platform.

The European Commission has just elected MARVEL project leader Nicola Spaldin of ETHZ as a member of the ERC Science Council.

The "Fix the leaky pipeline!" program will start a 3rd round of the one-to-one mentoring program for female PhD students (3rd year or above) and postdocs in the ETH Domain.

MARVEL and EPFL Science outreach department announce a new edition of the science workshop Diamants, alu, caoutchouc, ils sont fous ces matériaux, an initiative of the equal opportunities actions targeted at young girls.

MARVEL project leader Oleg Yazyev writes about his views on computations as an instrument for the discovery and design of new materials. He provides a broad overview of the field and gives a few examples of interesting materials discovered in silico (i.e. on computer) in his group and later verified experimentally.

"Pursue your career while raising a family." This is what the SNSF proposes with the Flexibility Grants.

We are happy to announce that Elena Gazzarini (King's College, London) and Yuri Cho (UniBas) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the October 2020 call. The two women will join MARVEL labs for a 6-month Master's research project — congratulations!