Dear MARVEL'ers,
The NCCR MARVEL is coming to an end; please find below our last newsletter, with highlights and news linked to the MARVEL community.
This month's highlight unveils Pheasy, a new open-source code to drive and simplify complex phonon simulations. Discover how MARVEL was also a subject of investigation through the lens of the social sciences. To conclude the MARVEL journey, you can read about the closing events which took place in June and July. The two-week MARVEL-ICTP college in Trieste was a great success, bringing together more than 200 graduate students and early-career researchers from 57 countries to learn about and explore the state of the art in computational materials science in the era of AI. And our final event, “MARVEL Fest: Party-ing away”, at EPFL was an extraordinary opportunity to meet, celebrate, and share the scientific advancements of the project.
Finally, a party-ing word from Nicola Marzari:
It’s been an intense and exciting 12 years — even 14, if we consider our pre-proposal and the HP2C support that allowed us to start brainstorming together. We leave behind many happy memories; possibly, the happiest ones come from reflecting on the difference we made in the lives of many students and researchers in Switzerland and all over the world. It’s a testament to the generosity and the extremely forward-looking attitude of the Swiss National Science Foundation that we were allowed to drive so many initiatives that helped and supported new generations of scientists and many under-represented communities. The ICTP-MARVEL College and the final event at EPFL summarized and showcased this beautifully — but the long and winding road included two outstanding Psi-k conferences in 2022 and 2025, each of them with more than 1,300 in-person participants — including the best childcare and after-dinner parties ever seen in science. The final slides (MARVEL Vision, MARVEL Science, and MARVEL Outreach and Legacy) and the final report summarize everything that has happened in these years — do have a look at them, and peruse to your heart’s content.
Last, I would like to recall a couple of core points. First — the vision of MARVEL remains as fresh and even more powerful than when we started — all the major internet companies and myriad start-ups are deeply invested in materials discovery; the US, with the Genesis Mission, and the EU, with the Advanced Materials initiative, have squarely put materials and materials discovery at the core of societal well-being. Second, we had 50M CHF to implement this vision over 12 years. This is what, across the pond, would be called a slam dunk — yet, while the results were good, research-wise, it still reads like a missed opportunity. Why this is so is explained in the conclusions of the final report, but perhaps the lesson I often repeat is that — for all the infinite merits and strengths of the Swiss scientific ecosystem — we remain overpaid and overfunded, and often ferociously top-down, while other communities elsewhere are more driven, more streamlined, more bottom-up, and more hungry.
So, stay hungry, stay foolish.
Nicola Marzari
