Scientist in Marzari’s lab at EPFL receives the Newton International Fellowship and a major Chinese governmental award

Changpeng Lin, a member of Nicola Marzari’s laboratory for Theory and Simulation of Materials (THEOS) at EPFL, is among the recipients of the 2025 Royal Society Newton International Fellowship. The fellowship supports outstanding non-UK researchers in the early stages of their careers who wish to conduct research in the UK towards developing an independent research career.

Lin will use the Fellowship to develop a project on “Probe superconducting and electron fluid phases in strongly correlated materials” and explore universal transport signatures of high-temperature superconductivity and electron hydrodynamics.

The project will build on his PhD thesis on “Thermodynamics and exotic transport phenomena in emerging materials”, defended on 10 September 2025. The thesis was funded by the SNSF Sinergia project “Hydronics”, that involved Nicola Marzari and other MARVEL members in his laboratory. The project brought together experts in theory, materials growth, nanofabrication, and device engineering to understand and control the phenomena by which, in special conditions, hydrodynamic transport of heat and charge can happen, which can lead to a new generation of electronic devices.

For his Newton International Fellowship, Changpeng Lin will be hosted by the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge, under the sponsorship of Professor Bartomeu Monserrat. His tenure will start from 1 March 2026 and will run for two years. The fellowship is jointly run by the British Academy and the Royal Society. 

Changpeng Lin was also recently awarded the 2024-2025 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad, which acknowledges Chinese doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers who study or do research outside of China and do not use direct funding from the Chinese government. The awarding ceremony happens on 5 December 2025 in Bern, at the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in Switzerland.