Communication

Registrations for the 2019-2020 edition of the mathematics workshops Maths en jeu open on 4 Feb 2019. These workshops are taking place at EPFL and target girls and boys 8 to 15 years old. They are part of the equal opportunities actions of the EPFL Science outreach department supported by MARVEL.

We are happy to announce that Tara Niamh Tosic (EPFL, Switzerland), Julieta Trapé (National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina), Sinjini Bhattacharjee (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, India), Maria Syzgantseva (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia) and Chiara Devescovi (Sacred Heart Catholic University, Brescia, Italy) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the October 2018 call. All five women will join MARVEL labs in the coming months -- congratulations!

A team of NCCR MARVEL PIs has won a swissuniversities P-5 grant to further develop the Materials Cloud web platform for Computational Open Science. The project will ultimately allow users to autonomously contribute hundreds of different data entries in the different sections without having to interact with one of the platform maintainers. 

The Swiss National Science Foundation has awarded MARVEL full funding of 18 million Swiss francs for its second phase, which will run until April 2022.  

Two MARVEL postdocs and three PIs will give invited talks at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, being held March 4- 8 in Boston, Massachusetts.

MARVEL and EPFL's Science outreach department announce three equal opportunity initiatives targeting girls and boys. They will take place at EPFL in 2019.

Annual list from Clarivate Analytics identifies researchers with multiple papers ranking in the top 1% by citations for their field and year.

Some 17'000 visitors took part in the fifth edition of EPFL’s science fair Scientastic on 10 and 11 November.  The theme of the fair was “digitalization at your fingertips” and presenters, including NCCR MARVEL, tackled the question of how to make digitalization easy to understand through a series of demonstrations, displays, talks and workshops. This was the fifth edition of EPFL’s science fair – the next will be held in Sion (Valais) on 18–19 May 2019. Some pictures from the MARVEL stand are below: all photo credits to NCCR MARVEL.

An installation sponsored by NCCR MARVEL and EPFL's Institute of Materials now inspires those passing through the entry hall of building MX on the EPFL campus.   

Gabriel Aeppli, professor at the Paul Scherrer Institute and a member of MARVEL's Scientific Advisory Board and Nicola Spaldin, professor at ETH Zurich and a MARVEL Group Leader, are part of a team that have been awarded a 2018 ERC Synergy Grant for their project "HERO" — Hidden, Entangling and Resonating Orders.   

More than 50 people from the materials science scene in Switzerland gathered in Bern on Thursday, 4 October to learn about ongoing CCMX and NCCR MARVEL projects and network. The second Materials Science day featured both experimental and modelling approaches to current challenges in materials science. 

Attracting more than 170 participants, the first edition of the International Workshop on Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials (COMDI 2018) held on September 10-12 at the SwissTech Convention Center was a success!