Communication

We are happy to announce that Maria Andolfatto (University of Milano-Bicocca) was granted an INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowship through a anticipated evaluation in September 2024. She will join the MARVEL lab of Nicola Marzari for a 6-month Master's project. On her side, Mitra Dowlatabadi is the first recipient of the new MARVEL INSPIRE visiting PhD fellowship. As a PhD student at the University of Trieste, under the supervision of Antimo Marrazzo, she will spend 6 months in the group of Nicola Marzari at EPFL for a fruitful collaboration — congratulations to both!

Over 60 participants gathered in St. Moritz from 10 to 13 September for the 6th MARVEL Junior Retreat, the event that every year brings together PhD students and postdocs from MARVEL groups, giving them an opportunity to discuss important career issues as well as their research work. This year’s theme was “entrepreneurship, technology transfer, intellectual property rights”, and the goal was to help participants explore the opportunities for a career outside academia.

We are happy to announce that Katja Moos (UniFR) was granted an INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowship after the April 2024 call. She will join the MARVEL lab of Michael Schüler for a 6-month research project — congratulations!

Since 2023, the Academies of Sciences Switzerland have been awarding the National Prize for Open Research Data (ORD Prize). This is part of the Action Plan "Open Research Data" implemented by the Academies as part of the National Strategy for Open Research Data. MARVEL Director Nicola Marzari, with his team, was among the four researchers who received a special acknowledgement from the jury at the first edition. Applications for the 2024 edition are open until 31 July 2024. Consider your participation.

We are happy to announce that Sofiia Chorna (ENSTA, Paris, France) was granted an INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowship through a anticipated evaluation early April 2024. She has joined the MARVEL lab of Michele Ceriotti for a 3.5-month research project — congratulations! The grantees of the April 2024 call will be announced shortly.

With the support of the NCCR MARVEL, on 16 April 2024, the Ig Nobel Award Tour show was back at EPFL after a 5-year break. An evening of great science and laughs, with Marc Abrahams and the Ig Nobel Prize winners Chris Moulin, Damien Bouffard and Minna Lyons. It was about people who habitually stay up late, about sexual activity of anchovies, or about repeating a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. If you missed it or if you would like to relive its best moments, the video is available.

The master’s course at the ICTP-East African Institute for Fundamental Research (EAIFR) in Rwanda is accepting applications for  the 2024/2025 academic year. There are scholarships available for Rwandan students and a small number of scholarships for students from other African countries, including one sponsored by MARVEL as part of its support to students from under-represented groups. The deadline for application is June 28, 2024.

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!