News

The 12th edition of the International Conference of the African Materials Research Society, held biannually since 2000, took place in the Rwandan capital from 16 to 19 December. MARVEL Director Nicola Marzari and CECAM Deputy Director Sara Bonella were featured among the speakers of the event, that gathered several hundred experts from around the world and focussed on emerging themes in materials science, including biomaterials, energy materials, nanotechnology, sustainability, advanced materials and more.

On December 4, the EPFL professor and MARVEL member received the prestigious prize, awarded annually since 1983 by Harvard University to distinguished chemists. On  the occasion he delivered a lecture entitled "Machine learning for chemistry: between physics and scaling", where he provided an overview of the progress that has been made combining these two philosophies, using data-driven techniques to build surrogate models of the quantum mechanical behavior of atoms, enabling "bottom-up" simulations that reveal the behavior of matter in realistic conditions with uncompromising accuracy.

MARVEL and EPFL's Science Outreach Department are pleased to announce equal opportunity initiatives targeting girls and boys. Registration for the science workshop Diamants, alu, caoutchouc, ils sont fous ces matériaux (girls 7-10 years old) and for the Coding club des filles in the French part of Switzerland have opened on 3 December 2024 and fill up quickly. Those for the summer camps in chemistry and on materials science will open in spring 2025.

We are happy to announce that Maria Andolfatto (University of Milano-Bicocca) was granted an INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowship through a anticipated evaluation in September 2024. She will join the MARVEL lab of Nicola Marzari for a 6-month Master's project. On her side, Mitra Dowlatabadi is the first recipient of the new MARVEL INSPIRE visiting PhD fellowship. As a PhD student at the University of Trieste, under the supervision of Antimo Marrazzo, she will spend 6 months in the group of Nicola Marzari at EPFL for a fruitful collaboration — congratulations to both!

The University of Chicago professor, who is a member of the MARVEL Scientific Advisory Board, is this year’s awardee of the prestigious prize created by the University of Wisconsin-Madison to celebrate the work of theoretical chemistry pioneer Joseph O. Hirschfelder. Following the prize announcement in August, she has recently visited the Madison campus and given a talk on successes and challenges of quantum simulations of next generation materials.

Over 60 participants gathered in St. Moritz from 10 to 13 September for the 6th MARVEL Junior Retreat, the event that every year brings together PhD students and postdocs from MARVEL groups, giving them an opportunity to discuss important career issues as well as their research work. This year’s theme was “entrepreneurship, technology transfer, intellectual property rights”, and the goal was to help participants explore the opportunities for a career outside academia.

We are happy to announce that Katja Moos (UniFR) was granted an INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowship after the April 2024 call. She will join the MARVEL lab of Michael Schüler for a 6-month research project — congratulations!

The former INSPIRE Potentials fellow was honoured at the recent graduation ceremony for the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, for her Master's thesis written in Mathieu Luisier's group at ETH Zurich. 

Since 2023, the Academies of Sciences Switzerland have been awarding the National Prize for Open Research Data (ORD Prize). This is part of the Action Plan "Open Research Data" implemented by the Academies as part of the National Strategy for Open Research Data. MARVEL Director Nicola Marzari, with his team, was among the four researchers who received a special acknowledgement from the jury at the first edition. Applications for the 2024 edition are open until 31 July 2024. Consider your participation.

We are happy to announce that Sofiia Chorna (ENSTA, Paris, France) was granted an INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowship through a anticipated evaluation early April 2024. She has joined the MARVEL lab of Michele Ceriotti for a 3.5-month research project — congratulations! The grantees of the April 2024 call will be announced shortly.

With the support of the NCCR MARVEL, on 16 April 2024, the Ig Nobel Award Tour show was back at EPFL after a 5-year break. An evening of great science and laughs, with Marc Abrahams and the Ig Nobel Prize winners Chris Moulin, Damien Bouffard and Minna Lyons. It was about people who habitually stay up late, about sexual activity of anchovies, or about repeating a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. If you missed it or if you would like to relive its best moments, the video is available.

The EPFL professor and early MARVEL member has been elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) as a Foreign Member, because of his extensive work outside of the Netherlands. The motivation acknowledges his contributions to new simulation methods that have made possible the understanding and targeted design of nano-porous materials.