Prizes and awards

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.

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, will be awarded the 2020 European Chemistry Gold Medal in recognition of his exceptional achievements in the field.

A team of researchers including NCCR MARVEL’s Nicola Marzari won a Sinergia grant worth 2.79 million Swiss francs in the SNSF’s June 2019 call, which funded 23 new projects, the majority for a four-year period. The program promotes the interdisciplinary collaboration of up to four groups proposing breakthrough research.

The team—made up of Mathieu Luisier, a professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETHZ and group leader in MARVEL Design & Discovery Project 3, Alexandros Nikolaos Ziogas, Tal Ben-Nun, Timo Schneider and Torsten Hoefler from ETH’s Scalable Parallel Computing Laboratory and as well as Guillermo Indalecio Fernández from ETH’s Integrated Systems Laboratory—was awarded the prize for developing a simulation that maps heat in transistors. The new DaCe OMEN framework may help industry design better, more efficient computer chips.  

Nicola Spaldin, ETH Zurich professor and NCCR MARVEL project leader has been awarded the 2019 Marcel Benoist prize—the "Swiss Nobel Prize"—for her groundbreaking research on multiferroics. This new class of materials responds to both magnetic and electric fields, a combination that does not generally occur simultaneously. This unusual property makes multiferroics promising materials that could, for example, replace silicon in future computer chips. 

Clemence Corminboeuf, professor and head of the Laboratory for Computational Molecular Design and a member of MARVEL's Executive Committee, has been awarded the 2019 teaching excellence award from EPFL's Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Section for her outstanding contribution to teaching first year students, in computational chemistry and outreach for children, especially young girls.

NCCR MARVEL's director Nicola Marzari has been named to the Senior Editoral Board of Nature's Scientific Data publication.