Nicola Marzari holds the chair of Theory and Simulation of Materials at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he is also the director of the Swiss National Centre for Competence in Research NCCR MARVEL, on Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials.

Previous tenured appointment include the Toyota Chair for Materials Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the first Statutory (University) Chair of Materials Modelling at the University of Oxford, where he was also the director of the Materials Modelling Laboratory. He is the current chairman of the Psi-k Charity and Board of Trustees. More than 25 of his past group members hold faculty positions worldwide in the field, from Harvard to MIT, Imperial College, and Seoul National University.

Speaker of 1st Plenary: Almost there – what’s next?
TITLE. The great acceleration in the design and discovery of novel materials

ABSTRACT. Materials are the core of our technological advances, and are needed to address many of our societal challenges: from energy to information, from food to medicine. I’ll highlight the great strides made in last few years in the design and discovery of novel materials, where computational simulations can now precede, streamline, or accelerate experiments. This acceleration is driven by the central paradigm of computational science (a 100% performance improvement every 14 months), combined with powerful and predictive quantum simulation techniques and with the convergence of data mining and machine learning towards materials simulations.