Prizes and awards

Anatole von Lilienfeld, MARVEL group leader and head of a research group in the Chemistry Department of the University of Basel, was awarded the Feynman Theory Prize by the Foresight Institute on 23 May 2018 for introducing innovative new ways to accelerate QM quality predictions across materials compound space by multiple orders of magnitude.

Corina Keller, a student in Jürg Hutter's group at the University of Zurich, is awarded the IBM Research Forschungspreis for her MSc Thesis entitled “Simulation of Dynamic Atomic Force Microscopy Images". She will receive the prize from the president of the University next week during the Dies Academicus.

Giulia Palermo is a computational biophysicist with expertise in molecular simulations. She was an early post-doctoral scientist in the NCCR MARVEL affiliated group of Prof. Ursula Röthlisberger at EPFL from 2014 until 2016, where she earned expertise in ab-initio molecular dynamics (MD) methods and in their application to biological systems.

Congratulations to Alexey Soluyanov, MARVEL researcher at ETH Zurich! He was awarded a SNSF professor position at the University of Zurich, with his project entitled "Topological Phases: From New Fermions to Materials and Devices".

Congratulations to NCCR MARVEL's Nicolas Mounet  and his colleagues on their HPC Max Prize 2017 for their research on “Novel two-dimensional materials from high-throughput computational exfoliation of experimentally known compounds” using the AiiDA code!

The PHYS awards committee of the ACS Physical Chemistry Division has selected Professor Clemence Corminboeuf, MARVEL group leader and head of the Laboratory for Computational Molecular Design at EPFL, to receive the 2018 Early-Career Award in Theoretical Chemistry for her development of novel methods and conceptual tools and their implementation and application to organic systems.

Anatole von Lilienfeld, MARVEL group leader and head of a research group in the Chemistry Department of the University of Basel, was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council on 28 November 2017.

The Materials Research Society has chosen Professor Nicola Spaldin, MARVEL group leader and head of the Materials Theory group at ETH Zurich, to receive the Mid-Career Researcher Award for "her new theoretical framework describing multiferroics and service to the materials community".

Michele Ceriotti, MARVEL group leader and head of the laboratory for Computational Science and Modeling at EPFL, has been awarded the C10 Young Scientist Award for 2018 "for his work on the development of novel and original algorithms to extend the scope and accuracy of molecular dynamics simulations, and to rationalize and predict the structure-property relations in complex materials".

Andrea Cepellotti, former MARVEL PhD student in the group of Nicola Marzari, has been awarded the American Physical Society Nicholas Metropolis Award for his outstanding doctoral thesis work in computational physics.

Michele Parrinello, MARVEL group leader and professor of computational sciences at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, has been awarded the 2017 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences. He is honored "for his groundbreaking developments of molecular dynamics simulation methodology and associated landmark studies of chemical, material, and biomolecular systems".

In mid-August 2017, MARVEL members Marco Gibertini (EPFL) and Vladimir Rybkin (University of Zurich) were both awarded an Ambizione grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation.