Prizes and awards

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. 

MARVEL Executive Committee member and director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS Thomas Schulthess has been awarded the 2019 Doron Prize for his work in high-performance computing. Schulthess, who is also professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of ETHZ and co-leader of MARVEL's High Performance Computing and Future Architectures project, will be given the award at a ceremony in Zug on 3 April. He is the second MARVEL member to win the award after Ursula Röthlisberger's recognition in 2016.

NCCR MARVEL project leader Nicola Spaldin of ETHZ has been named a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States.  

Nicola Marzari, head of the Laboratory of theory and simulation of materials (THEOS) and director of the NCCR MARVEL has been granted an IBM Faculty Award—the first given to an EPFL professor—for the project “Curated Datasets on Demand”.

Professor Giulia Galli, a member of MARVEL Scientific Advisory Board, Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering at the Institute for Molecular Engineering (IME) and professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago and a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), was awarded the 2018 Materials Theory Award from the Materials Research Society. 

The European Research Council announced that 291 top scientists across Europe have been named as the recipients of its Consolidator Grant competition. MARVEL member Professor Clémence Corminboeuf is among them.  

NCCR MARVEL’s Professor Oleg Yazyev, who holds the Chair of Computational Condensed Matter Physics C3MP at EPFL, has been awarded a Prix Latsis universitaire 2018 for his work in the computer simulation of two-dimensional and topological materials. 

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.