Communication

Attracting more than 170 participants, the first edition of the International Workshop on Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials (COMDI 2018) held on September 10-12 at the SwissTech Convention Center was a success!

MARVEL and EPFL have organized the first edition of a  two-week summer camp for high school students destined to graduate next year, in which 13 of them could learn the basics of programming to study materials.

Would you like to organize the fifth MARVEL Junior Retreat next summer? Read about the 2018 retreat that took place in Fieschertal, Valais and get a taste of this special event!

In a study published in Angewandte Chemie, MARVEL members report on the increased stability of tin nitride under compression.

On Thursday, 20 September, Nicola Marzari, director of NCCR MARVEL, spoke on Il Giardino Di Albert, a show on Swiss radio station Rete Due. Dealing with both major issues that directly affect our daily lives (pollution, allergies, food) and laboratory research (medicines, new discoveries, inventions), it encourages popular debate on some fundamental themes of society. 

We are very pleased to announce a collaboration between Materials Cloud and the Nature Research data journal Scientific Data. Materials Cloud is now a recommended repository of Scientific Data.

Another AiiDA tutorial, sponsored by PRACE and the H2020 MaX Centre of Excellence, was organized in collaboration with the Italian CINECA supercomputer centre, who hosted the event. The tutorial took place between May 29 and June 1, 2018, at CINECA Bologna (Italy).

Empa researchers, members of the NCCR MARVEL, together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz and other partners, have achieved a breakthrough that could in future be used for precise nanotransistors or – in the distant future – possibly even quantum computers, as the team reports in the current issue of the scientific journal "Nature".

We are happy to announce that Charlotte Müller (UZH, CH) and Maria Bilichenko (Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, UA) have been granted an INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowship at the April 2018 call. Both women will join the lab of Jürg Hutter at UZH for a 6-month Master's research project.

EPFL — through the National Centre of Competence in Research MARVEL — recently signed an agreement with the firm Solvay. The aim of this partnership is to use quantum modeling to gain greater insight into physical and chemical phenomena and predict innovative materials and composites with a promising range of properties.

As part of the "Science and us, 6 Mondays to talk about the future" series, the Teatro Eliseo in Rome, on 7 May 2018, welcomed Nicola Marzari, director of MARVEL, for a talk entitled "New materials to rethink the world".

Watch the videos made during this event! On November 15, 2017, CECAM and NCCR MARVEL invited a truly outstanding representative of the first generation of coders, Mary Ann Mansigh Karlsen, to share her recollections of those pioneering efforts.