News

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 developers of AiiDA have released AiiDA v2.0. The culmination of more than two years of work, the update focused on re-designing the codebase to make it more performant, user-friendly and maintainable, with minimal changes to the API.

Registrations for the 2022-2023 edition of the mathematics workshops Maths en jeu open on 2 May 2022. These workshops are taking place at EPFL and target girls and boys 8 to 15 years old. They are part of the equal opportunities actions of the EPFL Science outreach department supported by MARVEL.

NCCR MARVEL PhD students Jigyasa Nigam and Miriam Pougin were among the young researchers taking part in the "Thematic day for high school students" organized by EPFL's Education Outreach Department on April 7 at the gymnasium in Thun. The event, whose theme was "Destination Innovation," gathered more than twenty researchers from the EPFL community. Speaking on topics from cryptography to space exploration and using supercomputers to design the materials of the future, they set out to enhance the visibility of EPFL study programs and communicate the range of opportunities open to students across Switzerland. 

The Swiss National Science Foundation has awarded MARVEL full funding plus the highest possible bonus for its third and final phase, which will run from May 2022 until April 2026.

Anirudh Raju Natarajan, whose research interests are in the computational design and discovery of advanced engineering materials, will join MARVEL in the upcoming phase III of the NCCR. Recently appointed professor at EPFL, Anirudh set up the laboratory of materials design and simulation (MADES) earlier this year and is looking forward to advancing the design and discovery of the next generation of high-performance engineering materials. You can read more about him in the text and interview below.

ETH Zurich has named Mathieu Luisier, NCCR MARVEL group leader in Design & Discovery Project 3, full professor. 

ETH Zurich has awarded Empa researcher Daniele Passerone, NCCR MARVEL group leader in Design & Discovery Project 3, the title of professor. The following article was written by Empa's Andrea Six.

MARVEL and EPFL's Science Outreach Department are pleased to announce equal opportunity initiatives targeting girls and boys. Two camps on materials and chemistry for children 11-13 years old supported by MARVEL will take place at EPFL in summer 2022. Registrations are opening on Monday and fill up quickly.

"A strong European Materials ecosystem drives the green and digital transition as well as a sustainable inclusive European society through a systemic collaboration of upstream  developers, downstream users and citizens and all stakeholders in between."

Materials Cloud, an Open Science Platform designed to enable the seamless sharing of resources in computational materials science, has reached the milestone 500 published record mark just four years after introduction.

The CarboQuant project, led by Professor Roman Fasel, head of the nanotech@surfaces lab at Empa and experimental group leader in NCCR MARVEL's  Design and Discovery Project 3, has received CHF15 million in funding  from the Werner Siemens Foundation. The grant, spread over ten years, will allow scientists to continue developing unique carbon materials that feature novel electronic and magnetic properties. The work may eventually lay the foundation for the development of quantum computers with novel architectures.  NCCR MARVEL members Pascal Ruffieux, Group Leader Carbon Nanomaterials, and Gabriela Borin Barin, research scientist in the nanotech@surfaces lab, are also involved in the project, which is coordinated by Oliver Gröning, Deputy Head of nanotech@surfaces Laboratory & Group Leader Functional Surfaces. The following is an article on the subject written by Empa's Rainer Klose.