Prof. Dr. Nicola Marzari

Biography

Nicola Marzari holds the chair of Theory and Simulation of Materials at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland), where he is also the director of the National Centre on Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He heads the Laboratory for Materials Simulations at the Paul Scherrer Institut (Switzerland) and holds an Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen (Germany).

Previous tenured appointments include the Toyota Chair for Materials Processing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the first Statutory Chair of Materials Modelling at the University of Oxford (UK), where he was also the director of the Materials Modelling Laboratory. He is a past Chairperson of the Psi-k Charity. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge (UK), and a Laurea in Physics from the University of Trieste (Italy).

His research is dedicated to the development and application of quantum-mechanical simulations to understand, predict, and design the properties and performance of novel materials and devices. More than 30 members of his group have moved to faculty positions worldwide, including MIT, Harvard, Imperial College, EPFL, and Seoul National; 5 have been awarded the US NSF CAREER Award. The open-access software and data infrastructure developed by the group sustains more than 4,000 scientific publications per year.