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Launched in 2017, this open repository for materials science data has kept growing constantly since then and is now one of the repositories of choice recommended by the European Commission, the  Swiss National Science Foundation and Nature Scientific Data. A new version with improved features will be launched in the second half of 2024, while the BIG-MAP  project will apply the same technology to create a restricted-access archive for sharing data within collaborations.

INSPIRE Potentials fellow Virginie de Mestral, now PhD student in the group of Professor Mathieu Luisier at ETH Zurich, took a moment to explain the appeal of the program that empowers excellent women students to conduct a Master's research project in simulation and modeling in an NCCR MARVEL laboratory.  We encourage you to share the video, which is also available on our Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

From 12 to 16 February, fifteen researchers met at the Paul Scherrer Institute for a hackaton and worked on a new version of the Wannier90 code. The new release will allow to compute Wannier functions in the form of a flexible "library mode", so that other simulation codes can benefit from it.

Registration to the science summer camps organized by the EPFL's Science Outreach Department in August are opening on 4 March 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 is supporting the summer camp in chemistry for girls and boys 11-13 years old (5 to 9 August 2024) and the summer camp on materials science Matériaux super géniaux for girls 11-13 years old (12 to 16 August 2024). 

We are happy to announce that Serena Bragadini (UNIMORE, Italy), Valentina Sanella (Univ. Milano-Bicocca, Italy), Hela Mhiri (ENIT, Tunisia and ENSTA, Paris, France) and Jayashree Narayan (IISER Mohali, India) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the October 2023 call. The four women are joining MARVEL labs for a 6-month Master's research project — congratulations!

Over 130 participants met in Grindelwald from 17 to 19 January to share new results and discuss plans for the final 2 years of the project. The creation of sustainable digital infrastructures for materials science, machine learning and large language models, new Swiss facilities and the exploration of quantum computing approaches were among the key topics of discussion.

The January 2024 issue of the journal dedicates the front page to the article "How to verify the precision of density-functional-theory implementations via reproducible and universal workflows", already published online in November 2023. The study is the most comprehensive verification effort so far on solid-state DFT codes, and involves 9 MARVEL researchers, including Giovanni Pizzi who is the corresponding author.

Nicola Marzari and his team at EPFL and the Paul Scherrer Institut received a special acknowledgement from the jury of the National Prize for Open Research Data, awarded by the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences on 6 December. The theme of the prize was “The re-use of research data”, for projects that either re-use data from other projects or make their own data available in such a way that other researchers can conduct further work with it.

A collaboration between the COSMO Lab and BASF demonstrates how ML-driven materials modeling can be used to solve pressing technological challenges, designing catalysts that require much smaller quantities of rare elements, and gets a special mention in the company's annual press conference. 

Like every year, Clarivate has published its list of Highly Cited Researchers who have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their field of research. NCCR MARVEL Director Nicola Marzari, who leads the Laboratory for Materials Simulations (LMS) at the Paul Scherrer Institute and the Laboratory of Theory and Simulation of Materials at EPFL, is featured in the list. 

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) are opening on 20 November 2023 and will fill up quickly. Registrations for the Coding club des filles in the French part of Switzerland are opening on 20 December 2023, with also propositions in the other cantons, in German and Italian with registrations all along the year. Those for the summer camps in chemistry and on materials science will open in March 2024.

Michael Herbst is a newly arrived tenure track professor with a joint affiliation between EPFL’s School of Engineering and School of Basic Sciences. He has joined MARVEL at the beginning of year 10, in May 2023, where he is a group leader in the Pillar 3, on Digital Infrastructure of Open Simulations and Data.  His desire is to bridge mathematics and materials science with numerical models.