News

Nicola Marzari and his team at EPFL and the Paul Scherrer Institut received a special acknowledgement from the jury of the National Prize for Open Research Data, awarded by the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences on 6 December. The theme of the prize was “The re-use of research data”, for projects that either re-use data from other projects or make their own data available in such a way that other researchers can conduct further work with it.

A collaboration between the COSMO Lab and BASF demonstrates how ML-driven materials modeling can be used to solve pressing technological challenges, designing catalysts that require much smaller quantities of rare elements, and gets a special mention in the company's annual press conference. 

Like every year, Clarivate has published its list of Highly Cited Researchers who have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their field of research. NCCR MARVEL Director Nicola Marzari, who leads the Laboratory for Materials Simulations (LMS) at the Paul Scherrer Institute and the Laboratory of Theory and Simulation of Materials at EPFL, is featured in the list. 

MARVEL and EPFL's Science Outreach Department are pleased to announce equal opportunity initiatives targeting girls and boys. Registration for the science workshop Diamants, alu, caoutchouc, ils sont fous ces matériaux (girls 7-10 years old) are opening on 20 November 2023 and will fill up quickly. Registrations for the Coding club des filles in the French part of Switzerland are opening on 20 December 2023, with also propositions in the other cantons, in German and Italian with registrations all along the year. Those for the summer camps in chemistry and on materials science will open in March 2024.

Michael Herbst is a newly arrived tenure track professor with a joint affiliation between EPFL’s School of Engineering and School of Basic Sciences. He has joined MARVEL at the beginning of year 10, in May 2023, where he is a group leader in the Pillar 3, on Digital Infrastructure of Open Simulations and Data.  His desire is to bridge mathematics and materials science with numerical models. 

On the Ada Lovelace Day, which every year celebrates and raises awareness of the contributions of women to STEM fields, Nature asked six women in computer science and technology reflect on their experiences in the field. One of them is Shobhana Narasimhan, a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru, India and a member of the SNSF's MARVEL Review Panel. 

The award recognizes the contributions “to a modern theory of thermal transport in solids” from his PhD research supervised by Nicola Marzari. 

The junior members of the consortium gathered in Davos from 11 to 15 September, to present their work and discuss how to improve the interaction between  the research world and the industrial one.

The University of Fribourg professor was awarded the prestigious recognition for her contributions to the physics of quantum materials obtained via infrared spectroscopy. 

We are happy to announce that Jente Clarysse (ETHZ), Anna Paulish (EPFL), Ayesha Ulde (IITM, India), Laura Mismetti (EPFL) and Aude Maier (EPFL) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the April 2023 call. The five women are joining MARVEL labs for a 6-month Master's research project — congratulations!

A recently-appointed Tenure Track Assistant Professor at EPFL, where she leads the Laboratory of Quantum Information and Computation, Zoë Holmes joined NCCR MARVEL in the spring of 2023 and now contributes to the Pillar on Quantum Simulations led by Giuseppe Carleo.

A  SNSF-funded study by MARVEL authors opens new doors for optimizing and comprehending the behavior of glassy thermal insulators