Prizes and awards

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Nicola Marzari and his team at EPFL and the Paul Scherrer Institut received a special acknowledgement from the jury of the National Prize for Open Research Data, awarded by the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences on 6 December. The theme of the prize was “The re-use of research data”, for projects that either re-use data from other projects or make their own data available in such a way that other researchers can conduct further work with it.

Like every year, Clarivate has published its list of Highly Cited Researchers who have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their field of research. NCCR MARVEL Director Nicola Marzari, who leads the Laboratory for Materials Simulations (LMS) at the Paul Scherrer Institute and the Laboratory of Theory and Simulation of Materials at EPFL, is featured in the list. 

The award recognizes the contributions “to a modern theory of thermal transport in solids” from his PhD research supervised by Nicola Marzari. 

The University of Fribourg professor was awarded the prestigious recognition for her contributions to the physics of quantum materials obtained via infrared spectroscopy. 

Professor William Curtin, head of the Laboratory for Multiscale Mechanics Modeling (LAMMM) at EPFL's School of Engineering and a NCCR MARVEL project leader, has been awarded the Irwin Gold Medal by the 2023 International Congress on Fracture (ICF). The award recognizes his "pioneering contributions to multiscale mechanics modeling of materials".

Michele Simoncelli, a former doctoral student at the Theory and Simulation of Materials (THEOS) lab of Professor Nicola Marzari and NCCR MARVEL, has been awarded the EPFL Doctorate Award for his 2021 thesis “Thermal transport beyond Fourier, and beyond Boltzmann”.

William Curtin, head of the Laboratory for Multiscale Mechanics Modeling (LAMMM) at EPFL's School of Engineering and project leader of NCCR MARVEL's Pillar 1, Design and Discovery of Novel Materials, has been selected as the 2022 recipient of the Multiscale Materials Modelling Distinguished Career Achievement Award by the MMM International Advisory Board.

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, is the first woman to have won the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics. The recognition comes for her groundbreaking work on multiferroics, a new class of materials that could facilitate novel microelectronics applications such as the building of ultra-fast data repositories or supersensitive sensors.