Nicola Marzari receives the 2026 David Adler Award in Materials Physics from the American Physical Society

NCCR MARVEL’s director Nicola Marzari is the recipient of the American Physical Society’s 2026 David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Material Physics. Each year, the award recognizes an outstanding contributor to the field of materials physics who has made an impact through high quality research, review articles, and lecturing.

The motivation for Marzari’s award is “for new theory and method developments that have advanced the predictive power of first-principles calculations, and for sustained leadership and community-building in computational materials physics”.  He will receive the award during the 2026 APS Global Physics Summit in Denver, Colorado, where he will give an invited talk on electronic-structure simulations.

Marzari is currently Professor and Chair of Theory and Simulation of Materials at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), heads the Laboratory for Materials Simulations at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), and is the director of NCCR MARVEL. He was recently appointed Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge, a post he will take up full time in September 2026.

On the award, Marzari commented that “it is always deeply honouring to be recognized by peers, and for an award that has such a distinguished history; equally satisfying is the recognition of the impact of electronic-structure calculations in science and technology, and their role in building scientific communities worldwide”.

The Adler lectureship was endowed in 1988 with contributions from the friends of David Adler (1935 –1987), an American physicist who as a MIT professor made major contributions to the understanding of semiconductors and other fields of condensed matter physics.

Some of the previous recipients include, on the theory side, Giulia Galli (2019), Jean-Luc Bredas (2013), Chris Van de Walle (2002), and John Joannopoulos (1997); on the experimental side Robert Cava (2021), Harry Atwater (2016), Stuart Parkin (2012), and Ramamoorthy Ramesh (2005); the full list is available here.

The award is supported by Energy Conversion Devices, Inc., as well as from the APS Division of Material Physics.