Prizes and awards

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 'RXN for Chemistry' project team from IBM Research Zurich has won the 2022 edition of the Sandmeyer award, which is presented annually to a team or an individual for outstanding work in the field of industrial or applied chemistry. Congratulations to the team!

Congratulations to former MARVEL members Antimo Marrazzo and Pablo Piaggi on winning the Prof. René Wasserman and IBM Research awards for work on novel materials and entropy, respectively! 

Prof. Giulia Galli (University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory), chair of MARVEL's Scientific Advisory Board, has been awarded the Aneesur Rahman Prize, which recognizes outstanding achievement in computational physics research.

Clémence Corminboeuf, head of EPFL's Computational Molecular Design Laboratory, and MARVEL Executive Committee member, received the Heilbronner-Hückel Lectureship Award from the Swiss and German chemical societies.

Michele Parrinello, professor of Computational Sciences at ETH Zurich and the Università della Svizzera italiana as well as group leader in NCCR MARVEL's Design & Discovery Project 1, was awarded the 2021 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry along with Roberto Car of Princeton University in recognition of their exceptional achievements in the field of molecular dynamics. 

MARVEL doctoral researcher Sauradeep Majumdar has won the FameLab International 2020 science communication competition with his three-minute talk explaining how scientists are using carbon capture to combat climat change.

MARVEL Professor Michele Ceriotti, of EPFL's Laboratory of Computational Science and Modeling (COSMO), was awarded the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant.

Michele Simoncelli, a doctoral student at the Theory and Simulation of Materials (THEOS) lab of Professor Nicola Marzari and NCCR MARVEL, has been awarded the 2020 Chorafas Foundation Award for his contributions to the theory of heat conduction in solids. His PhD thesis is about two novel equations: the first sheds light on how heat propagates at the quantum mechanical level, and the second generalizes the 200-year old Fourier heat equation for the temperature, explaining why heat propagation can become fluid-like, rather than diffusive in electronic or phononic devices. His contributions have already been applied in the fields of renewable energies, aerospace and electronics. 

Emiliana Fabbri, senior researcher in the Electrocatalysis and Interfaces group at PSI, has been awarded a PRIMA grant from the SNSF to support her research. She has been associated with MARVEL since May 2020 as group leader in Design and Discovery Project 4 with an Agility Plus grant on "Search for MOF-based catalysts for the electrochemical splitting of water".

Philippe Werner, professor of computational physics at the University of Fribourg, and group leader in MARVEL’s Design and Discovery 5 project, is this year’s recipient of the Charpak-Ritz Prize.

Giovanni Pizzi, EPFL researcher and NCCR MARVEL project leader has been selected for the 2020 prize of the Rodolphe and Renée Haenny Foundation.