"From atoms to computers" summer camp at EPFL

This was published on July 1, 2025

Fifteen high school students had the opportunity to participate in the summer camp on computational materials science organized from 23 to 27 June in Lausanne, organized by MARVEL with the EPFL Education Outreach Department. For the first two days, the programme focussed on an introduction to Python programming, based both on lectures and exercises, while the last three days were dedicated respectively to exercises on cellular automata, molecular dynamics and machine learning. The programme also included visits to several computational and experimental facilities at EPFL.

The 2025 edition of the summer camp for high school students “From atoms to computers” took place at EPFL from 23 to 27 June, giving 15 students the opportunity of a first-class introduction to materials simulation techniques, including molecular dynamics, cellular automata and machine learning. The course is organized by MARVEL with the EPFL Education Outreach Department, and this edition was coordinated by Anirudh Raju Natarajan.

The initiative has quite a long history,  having started in 2018 from an idea by MARVEL’s Michele Ceriotti. One of its historical goals has been to encourage girls to participate. Not only by reserving half of the places for females, but also by avoiding imposing prerequisites on mathematics level that may discourage girls because of the existing biases in high school. For the first time, this edition had more girls (nine) than boys (six), and this came as a natural result of the selection. Overall, nine participants came from Romandy (Vaud, Genève, Valais) and six from abroad (four from Turkey, one from Luxembourg and one from Ireland).

For the first two days, the programme focussed on an introduction to Python programming, based both on lectures and exercises, while the last three days were dedicated respectively to exercises on cellular automata, molecular dynamics and machine learning. The teaching team included Nicolas Richart, Emmanuel Lanti, Alessandro Carbone, Roel Raike, Mehrad Sahebi, Lorenzo Piersante, Yann Müller, Sandra Saade, all from EPFL.

The programme also included visits to facilities like the Swiss Plasma Center,  the SCITAS cluster for high-performance computing  and the Swiss CAT+ facility. Swiss CAT+ is a new data-driven automated infrastructure for catalysts discovery and optimization, shared by EPFL and ETHZ. It is one of the most automated labs in the world, with AI-controlled robots handling catalysis experiments.

Like in the previous editions, at the end of the week the participants shared their impressions and feedback in a questionnaire: the diversity of activities, the visits to the facilities, the availability of the instructors were the most appreciated elements of the school, which one of the students called "one of the best weeks of his life". 

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