Michele Ceriotti wins the E. Bright Wilson Prize

Source: EPFL School of Engineering | STI

For over 50 years, E. Bright Wilson, Jr., was one of the most distinguished and admired professors of chemistry at Harvard. The E. Bright Wilson Prize has been awarded annually since 1983 to distinguished chemists including Nobel prize winner Kenneth G. Wilson. This year, MARVEL's Michele Ceriotti, Associate Professor at the EPFL School of Engineering and a member of NCCR MARVEL's Executive Committee, was introduced by Joonho Lee of Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Ceriotti, head of the Laboratory of Computational Science and Modeling (COSMO), delivered a lecture entitled, "Machine learning for chemistry: between physics and scaling." Machine-learning techniques are often applied to perform "end-to-end" predictions, that is to make a black-box estimate of a property of interest using only a coarse description of the corresponding inputs. In contrast, atomic-scale modeling of matter is most useful when it allows one to gather a mechanistic insight into the microscopic processes that underlie the behavior of molecules and materials. In this talk, Ceriotti 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.

Michele Ceriotti received his Ph.D. in Physics from ETH Zürich, where he worked with Prof. Michele Parrinello. He spent three years in Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College. Since 2013 he has led the COSMO lab at EPFL, which focuses on method development for atomistic materials modeling based on statistical mechanics and machine learning. He is one of the core developers of several open-source software packages, including http://ipi-code.org and http://chemiscope.org, and proudly serves the atomistic modeling community as an associate editor of the Journal of Chemical Physics, as a moderator of the physics.chem-ph section of the arXiv, and as an editorial board member of Physical Review Materials. He has been a member of MARVEL since phase I.