Communication

The MARVEL community gathered in Grindelwald for the final MARVEL Review and Retreat to reflect on the program’s 12-year journey and celebrate the connections, collaborations, and sense of community that have grown over the years. From lively project sessions and poster discussions to a pub quiz and spontaneous gatherings, the retreat offered a unique mix of science, friendship, and reflection, celebrating both the NCCR’s achievements and the lasting impact it will have on participants and the wider research community.

Two more interviews filmed during the Psi-k 2025 that took place from 25 to 28 August in Lausanne, presenting a range of diverse perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that await the community. The interviews are also an opportunity to assess the impact of MARVEL and its impact on the field overall. Here are the interviews to Michele Kotiuga, a former MARVEL member who is now with the company Materials Design, and Indian professor Shobhana Narasimhan from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru.

Do you communicate about your research with the public? And do you use AI when doing so, or not? These are some of the questions the SNSF project "Science Communication in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" at the University of Zurich is trying to answer. Thus they are inviting researchers across all disciplines to participate to an anonymous online survey.

The Materials Cloud Archive has become even more accessible and easier to use for scientists. The repository for materials science supported by NCCR MARVEL has been integrated with Renku, the open-source platform for data science developed by the Swiss Data Science Center. The integration allows users to access the Materials Cloud Archive without installing the AiiDA workflow on their local system and without a previous knowledge of how AiiDA works, two factors that represented a barrier to access to the Materials Cloud for many scientists.

During the Psi-k 2025 that took place from 25 to 28 August in Lausanne, we interviewed several top experts in computational materials science and asked them how they see the future of the field. The resulting video interviews will be published over the course of the next weeks on our website, presenting a range of diverse perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that await the community. The interviews are also an opportunity to assess the impact of MARVEL and its impact on the field overall. Here are the interviews to Peter Haynes from Imperial College London, who was also the chair of Psi-k 2025, MARVEL member and EPFL professor Zoë Holmes, and Michele Ceriotti, EPFL professor and deputy director of MARVEL. 

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) and for the Coding club des filles in the French part of Switzerland have opened on 17 November and fill up quickly.

During the Psi-k 2025 that took place from 25 to 28 August in Lausanne, we interviewed several top experts in computational materials science and asked them how they see the future of the field. The resulting video interviews will be published over the course of the next weeks on our website, presenting a range of diverse perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that await the community. The interviews are also an opportunity to assess the impact of MARVEL and its impact on the field overall. We begin with the interviews to Giulia Galli from the University of Chicago, and Georg Kresse from the University of Vienna. 

Psi-k 2025, the largest conference worldwide for materials theory and prediction, electronic structure and ab-initio simulations, took place from 25 to 28 August at the SwissTech Convention center on the EPFL Campus in Lausanne. It attracted over 1,300 participants who could attend 345 talks overall, with 6 plenary talks, 35 symposia organized in 6 parallel sessions, and a poster session including over 760 posters. MARVEL Director and EPFL professor Nicola Marzari gave the opening plenary lecture  on 25 August. The event was a huge success and showcased the growth and livelihood of the computational materials science community. 

As part of the summer camp "Matériaux super géniaux" organized by the EPFL Science Outreach department and supported by the NCCR MARVEL, 20 girls aged 11 to 13 could discover some secrets of materials simulation through a visit of THEOS lab at EPFL, part of the NCCR MARVEL. They could also learn how to conduct an interview and practice it with MARVEL scientific manager Lidia Favre-Quattropani. A look back at these activities.

We are happy to announce that Veronika Lamparská (Univ. Stuttgart), Sofia Petrova (KU Leuven), and Mridhula Venkatanarayanan (EPFL) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the April 2025 call. The three women will join MARVEL labs for a 6-month Master's research project — congratulations!

Fifteen high school students had the opportunity to participate in the summer camp on computational materials science organized from 23 to 27 June in Lausanne, organized by MARVEL with the EPFL Education Outreach Department. For the first two days, the programme focussed on an introduction to Python programming, based both on lectures and exercises, while the last three days were dedicated respectively to exercises on cellular automata, molecular dynamics and machine learning. The programme also included visits to several computational and experimental facilities at EPFL.

Several MARVEL members contributed to the 8th African School on Electronic Structure Methods and Applications in Accra, Ghana. This edition involved 51 participants, from 17 different African countries, selected from over 170 applications. The programme included one week of theory and exercise, and one for developing projects. After eight editions the programme, that is co-sponsored by MARVEL, CECAM and ETH4D (Swiss funding scheme for collaborations with the Global South), is having a significant impact on the African scientific community, and has helped many African researchers progress in their careers.