News

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.

Clemence Corminboeuf, professor and head of the Laboratory for Computational Molecular Design and a member of MARVEL's Executive Committee, has been awarded the 2019 teaching excellence award from EPFL's Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Section for her outstanding contribution to teaching first year students, in computational chemistry and outreach for children, especially young girls.

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. 

NCCR MARVEL's director Nicola Marzari has been named to the Senior Editoral Board of Nature's Scientific Data publication. 

MARVEL Executive Committee member and director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS Thomas Schulthess has been awarded the 2019 Doron Prize for his work in high-performance computing. Schulthess, who is also professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of ETHZ and co-leader of MARVEL's High Performance Computing and Future Architectures project, will be given the award at a ceremony in Zug on 3 April. He is the second MARVEL member to win the award after Ursula Röthlisberger's recognition in 2016.

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. 

International Women's Day on March 8, is a day of celebration, acknowledging the social, economic, cultural, political and scientific achievements of women. It is also a day of strikes and activism, serving to highlight deficiencies that still exist and to demand the progress that must still be achieved in advocating and ensuring the rights of women and accelerating better gender balance in all areas of life. 

NCCR MARVEL project leader Nicola Spaldin of ETHZ has been named a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States.  

NCCR MARVEL director Nicola Marzari and Anatole von Lilienfeld, project leader of Incubator Project 2, were both cited in the Journal of Chemical Physics's Editor's Choice 2018 list, a selection of the JCP articles presenting significant and definitive research in experimental and theoretical areas of the field.  

A team made up of Giovanni Pizzi from NCCR MARVEL and Sara Bonella and Ignacio Pagonabarraga from the Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire (CECAM) won an EPFL Open Science Fund to build an open, collaborative online hub to host simulation and data-analysis tools. The project — called OSSCAR (Open Software Services for Classrooms and Research) — will effectively create an open-science environment that offers software tools as easy-to-use services requiring little or no setup time. 

Registrations for the 2019-2020 edition of the mathematics workshops Maths en jeu open on 4 Feb 2019. These workshops are taking place at EPFL and target girls and boys 8 to 15 years old. They are part of the equal opportunities actions of the EPFL Science outreach department supported by MARVEL.