News

We are happy to announce that Elena Gazzarini (King's College, London) and Yuri Cho (UniBas) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the October 2020 call. The two women will join MARVEL labs for a 6-month Master's research project — congratulations!

Michele Simoncelli, a doctoral student at the Theory and Simulation of Materials (THEOS) lab of Professor Nicola Marzari and NCCR MARVEL, has been awarded the 2020 Chorafas Foundation Award for his contributions to the theory of heat conduction in solids. His PhD thesis is about two novel equations: the first sheds light on how heat propagates at the quantum mechanical level, and the second generalizes the 200-year old Fourier heat equation for the temperature, explaining why heat propagation can become fluid-like, rather than diffusive in electronic or phononic devices. His contributions have already been applied in the fields of renewable energies, aerospace and electronics. 

MARVEL PIs Michele Ceriotti, involved in Design and Discovery Projects 1 and 2 and Oleg Yazyev, involved in Design and Discovery Project 6, have been named associate professors by the ETH Board.

Emiliana Fabbri, senior researcher in the Electrocatalysis and Interfaces group at PSI, has been awarded a PRIMA grant from the SNSF to support her research. She has been associated with MARVEL since May 2020 as group leader in Design and Discovery Project 4 with an Agility Plus grant on "Search for MOF-based catalysts for the electrochemical splitting of water".

Physical Review Materials has collected a selection of 10 of the most-cited papers that the journal published between 2017 and 2019. Two of these papers were published in the context of the NCCR MARVEL.

A new European project with a budget of about 20 million euros, led by the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) is aiming to develop the next generation of super batteries.

Philippe Werner, professor of computational physics at the University of Fribourg, and group leader in MARVEL’s Design and Discovery 5 project, is this year’s recipient of the Charpak-Ritz Prize.

Giovanni Pizzi, EPFL researcher and NCCR MARVEL project leader has been selected for the 2020 prize of the Rodolphe and Renée Haenny Foundation.

We are happy to announce that Veronica Michel (ETHZ), Miriam Stuke  (UniBas) and Maria Pakhnova (MIPT, Moscow) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the April 2020 call. The three women will join MARVEL labs for a 6-month Master's research project — congratulations!

After nearly 18 months of planning and programming, the team behind the new Materials Cloud Archive has unveiled a major reengineering based on the CERN-developed data technology that also drives the massive Zenodo repository. The new archive improves the user experience, permits the scaling needed to accommodate the growing number of submissions and helps moderators and developers focus on the core work of the archive—enabling the seamless sharing and dissemination of resources in computational materials science.

Density-functional theory has become a very popular and powerful approach to the calculation from first-principles of the properties of molecules and materials. In three two-hour sessions, dubbed "a great introduction to electronic structure calculations and DFT" by one Twitter user, Nicola Marzari provided a gentle introduction to the fundamentals, practical application and the capabilities and limits of the technique over Zoom. The first session maxed out at more than 500 participants before it even got started. The recordings are now available on Materials Cloud.  

Wannier90 has recently become a community code with a wide base of contributors. It has  grown significantly, gaining many novel features, an evolution that culminated in the release of a new version, a new website and a collaborative article. A 3-day school from 25 to 27 March 2020, originally meant to be held in Oxford, England, aimed to present the state-of-the-art functionalities, with a particular focus on the latest developments to new and experienced users and developers alike. The school was instead held in virtual form, saving an estimated 30 metric tons of CO2, and providing a template for future remote versions of the course.