Communication

Professor Michael Schüler of the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) joined NCCR MARVEL in Phase III, and is now a Group Leader in the “Advanced Simulation Methods” project. To highlight the expertise he brings to NCCR MARVEL, we repost a recent story from the PSI website, about a study he co-authored in Nature. In this study, ultra-short and strong light fields were used to directly observe how exotic energetic states, so-called Floquet bands, form in a crystal. 

The installation, on display since 2018 in the entry hall of the Institute of Materials (IMX), has been expanded and updated with the addition of two more faculty members, and now showcases twelve EPFL professors active in the field of materials science.

MARVEL and EPFL's Science Outreach Department are pleased to announce equal opportunity initiatives targeting girls and boys. Registrations for the 2023-2024 edition of the mathematics workshops Maths en jeu (girls and boys 8 to 15 years old) are opening on 1st May 2023. Those for the science workshop Diamants, alu, caoutchouc, ils sont fous ces matériaux (girls 7-10 years old) are opening on 15 May 2023. Both will fill up quickly. The Coding club des filles is proposing workshops with registrations all along the year.

With this new MARVEL week in the #NCCRWomen campaign, meet former and current MARVEL INSPIRE Potentials fellows and discover their portraits on Twitter and Instagram. After Virginie de Mestral on Monday, Yuri Cho Tuesday,  Arianna Cantarella Wednesday and Linda Mauron yesterday, meet today Melika Honarmand. The MARVEL INSPIRE Potentials fellowships empower excellent women students to conduct a Master's research project in simulation and modeling in an NCCR MARVEL laboratory.  Next application deadline: 15 April 2023!

With this new MARVEL week in the #NCCRWomen campaign, meet Giovanna Lani, Marija Stojkovic and Ksenia Briling, and discover their portraits on Twitter and Instagram. 

The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) network has approved a new program on Machine Learning for Molecule Discovery, which will be represented at EPFL by Prof. Michele Ceriotti, head of the School of Engineering’s Laboratory of Computational Science and Modelling, with the support of NCCR MARVEL and the Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire (CECAM).

Prof. Steve Ndengué from the East African Institute for Fundamental Research, University of Rwanda, is working with EPFL's Prof. Nicola Marzari as part of the Junior Faculty Development programme (JFD) of EPFL-UM6P’s Excellence in Africa initiative. The JFD program is meant to foster collaboration between Africa-based young professors and EPFL professors on projects addressing African and global challenges. Ndengué and Marzari are working on a project called Embedded exact quantum dynamics for photocatalytic water splitting, meant to improve understanding of the photochemical processes that might be used in applications such as producing fuel simply from water and sunlight. This project will rely on a regional computational center located in Rwanda, supported by EPFL, to accurately simulate the dynamics of these chemical processes.

We are happy to announce that Linda Mauron (EPFL), Noémie Hu (EPFL), Melika Honarmand (Tehran Polytechnic, Iran), and Eva Doloszeski (TU Wien, Austria) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the October 2022 call. The four women will join MARVEL labs for a 6-month Master's research project — congratulations!

A consortium led by Dr. Giovanni Pizzi, project leader of NCCR MARVEL’s Pillar 3, “Digital Infrastructure of Open Simulations and Data,” and Group leader of the “Materials Software and Data” group at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), has won funding of almost CHF1.3 million for a three-year project dubbed PREMISE: “Open and reproducible materials science research”.  

Michael Schüler has been assistant professor at the University of Fribourg, and group leader "Light-matter interactions" in the "Laboratory of Materials Simulations" at the Paul Scherrer Institute since September 2022. He joined NCCR MARVEL in phase III as group leader in the Continued Support, Advanced Simulation Methods.

The #NCCRWomen are back. The campaign is relaunched with portraits and interviews of more women researchers in Switzerland and more exciting science. Meet them on Twitter and Instagram, starting with #NCCRWomen Principal Investigators of MARVEL, Clémence Corminboeuf, Sara Bonella, Ana Akrap, Sereina Riniker and Marta Gibert.

A team of NCCR MARVEL members participated in Paul Scherrer Institute’s “Tag der offenen Tür,” or Open Doors Day, on October 23rd, explaining magnons and phonons and the use of supercomputers to study them to children and adults alike. The event, hosted every five years, drew some 15,000 people.