News

Psi-k 2022 will welcome from this Monday, August 22 more than 1,200 participants at the SwissTech Convention Center for the sixth edition of its general conference gathering the entire Psi-k community. This is a worldwide network of researchers self-organized into a charity and working on the advancement of first-principles computational materials science. Such success highlights the global impact of this burgeoning field, says Professor Nicola Marzari, head of Theory and simulation of materials at EPFL and Materials simulations at the Paul Scherrer Institute, and Chairperson of Psi-k 2022.   

Mathieu Luisier, professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETHZ and project leader of the Continued Support, Advanced Simulation Methods at NCCR MARVEL, has won an Advanced Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to continue the development of technology computer aided design (TCAD) tools that integrate the physics needed to design next-generation nanoscale devices.

Nicola Spaldin, Professor of Materials Theory at the Department of Materials Science at ETHZ and formerly project leader of NCCR MARVEL's Design & Discovery Project 5, is the first woman to have won the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics. The recognition comes for her groundbreaking work on multiferroics, a new class of materials that could facilitate novel microelectronics applications such as the building of ultra-fast data repositories or supersensitive sensors.

We are happy to announce that Arianna Cantarella (University of Parma) was granted an INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowship after the April 2022 call. She will join a MARVEL lab for a 6-month Master's research project — congratulations!

The first ever PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) HPC Excellence Award has been awarded to a team led by Professor Nicola Marzari, head of Theory and Simulation of Materials at EPFL's School of Engineering and Materials Simulations at PSI, and director of NCCR MARVEL. The € 20,000 award is given to “an outstanding individual or team for ground-breaking research that leads to significant advances in any research field through the usage of high-performance computing”, and recognizes the team’s effort in the discovery and characterization of novel two-dimensional materials.

Professor Nicola Spaldin, Professor of Materials Theory at the Department of Materials Science at ETHZ and formerly project leader of NCCR MARVEL's Design & Discovery Project 5, has won the EPS Europhysics Prize for her seminal contributions to the physics and applications of multiferroic and magnetoelectric materials. The prize was also awarded to Spaldin's colleagues Prof. Agnès Barthélémy and Dr. Manuel Bibes (CNRS/Thales laboratory of University Paris-Saclay) and Prof. Ramamoorthy Ramesh (UC Berkeley). The full press release from the European Physical Society is available here.

The developers of AiiDA have released AiiDA v2.0. The culmination of more than two years of work, the update focused on re-designing the codebase to make it more performant, user-friendly and maintainable, with minimal changes to the API.

Registrations for the 2022-2023 edition of the mathematics workshops Maths en jeu open on 2 May 2022. These workshops are taking place at EPFL and target girls and boys 8 to 15 years old. They are part of the equal opportunities actions of the EPFL Science outreach department supported by MARVEL.

NCCR MARVEL PhD students Jigyasa Nigam and Miriam Pougin were among the young researchers taking part in the "Thematic day for high school students" organized by EPFL's Education Outreach Department on April 7 at the gymnasium in Thun. The event, whose theme was "Destination Innovation," gathered more than twenty researchers from the EPFL community. Speaking on topics from cryptography to space exploration and using supercomputers to design the materials of the future, they set out to enhance the visibility of EPFL study programs and communicate the range of opportunities open to students across Switzerland. 

The Swiss National Science Foundation has awarded MARVEL full funding plus the highest possible bonus for its third and final phase, which will run from May 2022 until April 2026.

Anirudh Raju Natarajan, whose research interests are in the computational design and discovery of advanced engineering materials, will join MARVEL in the upcoming phase III of the NCCR. Recently appointed professor at EPFL, Anirudh set up the laboratory of materials design and simulation (MADES) earlier this year and is looking forward to advancing the design and discovery of the next generation of high-performance engineering materials. You can read more about him in the text and interview below.

ETH Zurich has awarded Empa researcher Daniele Passerone, NCCR MARVEL group leader in Design & Discovery Project 3, the title of professor. The following article was written by Empa's Andrea Six.