News

A team of researchers including NCCR MARVEL’s Nicola Marzari won a Sinergia grant worth 2.79 million Swiss francs in the SNSF’s June 2019 call, which funded 23 new projects, the majority for a four-year period. The program promotes the interdisciplinary collaboration of up to four groups proposing breakthrough research.

Papers from NCCR MARVEL members Clemence Corminboeuf, Michele Ceriotti, Anatole von Lilienfeld and Teodoro Laino made up nearly half of the scientific articles included in CHIMIA's recent publication focused on Artificial Intelligence in Swiss Chemical Research.

We are happy to announce that Dune André (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris) and Yuting Chen (ETHZ) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the October 2019 call. The two women will join MARVEL labs for a 6-month Master's research project — congratulations!

MARVEL and EPFL's Science Outreach Department are pleased to announce three equal opportunity initiatives targeting girls and boys 7 to 13 years old. One science workshop on materials and two camps on materials and chemistry supported by MARVEL will take place at EPFL in 2020. Registrations are open and fill up quickly.

The team—made up of Mathieu Luisier, a professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETHZ and group leader in MARVEL Design & Discovery Project 3, Alexandros Nikolaos Ziogas, Tal Ben-Nun, Timo Schneider and Torsten Hoefler from ETH’s Scalable Parallel Computing Laboratory and as well as Guillermo Indalecio Fernández from ETH’s Integrated Systems Laboratory—was awarded the prize for developing a simulation that maps heat in transistors. The new DaCe OMEN framework may help industry design better, more efficient computer chips.  

NCCR MARVEL director Nicola Marzari has once again been named to the Web of Science Group’s annual list of Highly Cited Researchers. Now in its sixth year, the citation analysis identifies influential researchers as determined by their peers around the globe.

Professor Clémence Corminboeuf, head of the Laboratory for Computational Molecular Design at EPFL and part of MARVEL’s Executive Committee, has been interviewed as part of  “100 Women and Thousands More,” a campaign aiming to show young people – especially girls – the wide range of exciting paths taken by women living in French- and Italian-speaking Switzerland and neighboring France. Most of the women interviewed completed training or pursued careers in fields considered “male” and such career choices are often seen as exceptions to the norm. The multi-partner campaign aims to do away with this misconception by providing role models and challenging prevailing stereotypes.  

I am very sorry to report that Alexey Soluyanov passed away on Oct 26, in St. Petersburg. Alexey was a wonderful human being, and a bright and dedicated colleague, and we will miss him tremendously.At this time our thoughts are with his family, and all who knew and loved him; our only consolation is that his remarkable scientific contributions will continue to inspire our entire community for years to come.You can read on some of his fascinating work here, for the Nature 2015 prediction of Type II Dirac fermions well before experiments could confirm them, or here, for the 2019 Science prediction of novel 1D topological phases. More on his life and work is also on the website of the University of Zurich.We'll miss you very much, Alexey; and thanks a lot for all that you have given us.Nicola Marzari

EPFL organizes thematic days that allow high school students to discover various research domains within their own four walls. NCCR MARVEL was represented by Lidia Favre-Quattropani, scientific manager, Antimo Marrazzo, a PhD student in the group of Prof. Nicola Marzari, and Emilie Vuille-dit-Bille, a master’s student in the section of Materials Science and Engineering, at the most recent event, held at the Lycée cantonal de Porrentruy on 30 October 2019.   

Nicola Spaldin, ETH Zurich professor and NCCR MARVEL project leader has been awarded the 2019 Marcel Benoist prize—the "Swiss Nobel Prize"—for her groundbreaking research on multiferroics. This new class of materials responds to both magnetic and electric fields, a combination that does not generally occur simultaneously. This unusual property makes multiferroics promising materials that could, for example, replace silicon in future computer chips. 

MARVEL supports the "Coding club des filles", a project initiated by the EPFL Science Outreach Department with the support of the Federal Office for Gender Equality. It offers coding workshops for girls 11 to 15 years old organized throughout French-speaking Switzerland.

We are happy to announce that Jigyasa Nigam (Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), Trivandrum, Kerala, India), Joanna Stoycheva (Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Bulgaria) and Linnea Mørch Folkmann (University of Copenhagen, Danemark) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the April 2019 call. All three women will join MARVEL labs for a 6-month Master's research project — congratulations!