Communication

NCCR MARVEL director Nicola Marzari has once again been named to the Web of Science Group’s annual list of Highly Cited Researchers. Now in its sixth year, the citation analysis identifies influential researchers as determined by their peers around the globe.

Professor Clémence Corminboeuf, head of the Laboratory for Computational Molecular Design at EPFL and part of MARVEL’s Executive Committee, has been interviewed as part of  “100 Women and Thousands More,” a campaign aiming to show young people – especially girls – the wide range of exciting paths taken by women living in French- and Italian-speaking Switzerland and neighboring France. Most of the women interviewed completed training or pursued careers in fields considered “male” and such career choices are often seen as exceptions to the norm. The multi-partner campaign aims to do away with this misconception by providing role models and challenging prevailing stereotypes.  

EPFL organizes thematic days that allow high school students to discover various research domains within their own four walls. NCCR MARVEL was represented by Lidia Favre-Quattropani, scientific manager, Antimo Marrazzo, a PhD student in the group of Prof. Nicola Marzari, and Emilie Vuille-dit-Bille, a master’s student in the section of Materials Science and Engineering, at the most recent event, held at the Lycée cantonal de Porrentruy on 30 October 2019.   

I am very sorry to report that Alexey Soluyanov passed away on Oct 26, in St. Petersburg. Alexey was a wonderful human being, and a bright and dedicated colleague, and we will miss him tremendously.At this time our thoughts are with his family, and all who knew and loved him; our only consolation is that his remarkable scientific contributions will continue to inspire our entire community for years to come.You can read on some of his fascinating work here, for the Nature 2015 prediction of Type II Dirac fermions well before experiments could confirm them, or here, for the 2019 Science prediction of novel 1D topological phases. More on his life and work is also on the website of the University of Zurich.We'll miss you very much, Alexey; and thanks a lot for all that you have given us.Nicola Marzari

MARVEL supports the "Coding club des filles", a project initiated by the EPFL Science Outreach Department with the support of the Federal Office for Gender Equality. It offers coding workshops for girls 11 to 15 years old organized throughout French-speaking Switzerland.

We are happy to announce that Jigyasa Nigam (Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), Trivandrum, Kerala, India), Joanna Stoycheva (Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Bulgaria) and Linnea Mørch Folkmann (University of Copenhagen, Danemark) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the April 2019 call. All three women will join MARVEL labs for a 6-month Master's research project — congratulations!

Swiss television station RTS's « Le Court du Jour » is a series of short programs meant to provide the general public with a daily educational exploration of different domains. From culture to the environment, passing through the sciences, sport and health, “Le Court du Jour” addresses different topics with the aim of providing clear, entertaining information. Clémence Corminboeuf, professor at the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at EPFL and a member of MARVEL's Executive Committee, recently took part in a series called "Femmes de Science".

Machine Learning: Science and Technology (MLST), a new open access journal devoted to the application and development of machine learning for the sciences, has appointed two NCCR MARVEL members to it editorial team. Prof. Anatole von Lilienfeld of the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Basel and project leader of MARVEL Incubator Project 2 has been named Editor-in-Chief. Prof. Clémence Corminboeuf, professor at the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at EPFL and part of MARVEL's Executive Committee, has been named to the editorial board. The journal is now open for submissions.

This year’s Summer Camp “Des atomes aux ordinateurs” at EPFL attracted 21 high school students — 10 women and 11 men — for a full week of lectures, exercises and lab visits built around the theme of scientific programming. With motivations ranging from a general desire to learn more about EPFL overall to a passion for the chemical properties of different materials, students came from the Romandie and other parts of Switzerland — as well as France, the U.S. and even Hong Kong — to deepen their knowledge of the programming language Python. 

Five PhD students involved in NCCR MARVEL projects recently travelled to the 2019 Many Electron Collaboration Summer School held at the Simons Foundation in New York. The students spent a week attending lectures on topics ranging from Many Body Physics to Topological Quantum Chemistry to Machine Learning Methods. Participant Sara Fiore, a PhD student at ETH Zurich summarizes their experience, and each of the students gives his or her own take on the school below.

Professor Nicola Spaldin of ETH Zürich and project leader of MARVEL Design & Discovery Project 5 has been appointed Lead Editor of Physical Review Research, the new fully open access, multidisciplinary American Physical Society journal being introduced this year. 

To mark the occasion of Nature Chemistry turning 10 years old, the publication asked scientists working in different areas of chemistry to tell them what they thought the most exciting, interesting or challenging aspects related to the development of their main field of research will be. Clémence Corminboeuf,  a member of MARVEL's executive committee as well as professor and head of EPFL's Laboratory for Computational Molecular Design, was asked to give her thoughts on computational chemistry.