Snehal Kumbhar

Snehal did a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from Shivaji University, India and worked for IBM for two years. After working in the IT industry, Snehal moved to Edinburgh, Scotland for a master’s degree in Informatics. She then worked at Juelich Research Centre, Germany for three and half years, where she contributed to the development of interoperable web services for climate research. She joined EPFL in 2015 and has been working on the AiiDA and Materials Cloud projects. In her free time she enjoys traveling and visiting historical places. She also enjoys reading fiction.

Interview by Carey Sargent, EPFL, NCCR MARVEL

The biggest challenges facing women scientists are... 

I have been enjoying my work with wonderful team here in EPFL as well as in my previous work at Juelich. I would not say I have faced challenges specifically as a woman. But, overall I see that the percentage of women moving into the academic and scientific community remains comparatively low. This is specifically true in computer science and engineering streams. One thing that I have seen from personal experience is that while living in different countries over last nine years, we need to give bit extra attention for balancing work and family aspects. 

I chose a scientific career because ...

I have always been amazed by how scientific discoveries have improved the quality of life at different stages – from routine work of our everyday lives to global issues.  An opportunity to work on challenging problems and contributing to scientific research in some way has motivated me to move from industry to academia. Opportunities to collaborate with international team of experts and present our work at different scientific venues is most satisfying part of our work.

My most exciting MARVEL discovery to date... 

During last three years I have been mainly contributing to the development of Materials Cloud project. Materials Cloud is a web platform designed to enable seamless sharing of resources in computational materials science. I joined the project in early days and got an opportunity to shape fundamental design and implementation of the web platform. We released first version of Materials Cloud in 2016 and improving it further. I believe this is my important contribution during my work at MARVEL.