Michele Simoncelli wins the SPS Award in Computational Physics

Former MARVEL member Michele Simoncelli has been recently awarded by the Swiss Physical Society (SPS) for the research work he started during his PhD with Nicola Marzari’s group at EPFL and now continuing at University of Cambridge.

The Computational Physics award is given annually by the SPS and is sponsored by COMSOL Multiphysics GmbH, a software company that develops solutions for physics simulation. The award recognizes Michele’s contributions “to a modern theory of thermal transport in solids”.

Simoncelli’s PhD research—supervised by Nicola Marzari—contributed to the fundamental understanding of heat transport in solids, developing a theoretical and computational framework that rationalizes properties ranging from the atomistic to the macroscopic scale. At the atomistic level, it unified the existing fundamentally different microscopic theories of heat conduction in crystals and glasses, showing that the quantum wave-particle duality emerges in thermal transport and solving the long-standing problem of accurately predicting the thermal properties of crystals such as thermoelectrics with ultralow or glass-like thermal conductivity.