News

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.

CP2K is an open-source quantum chemistry and solid state physics software package that can perform atomistic simulations of solid state, liquid, molecular, periodic, material, crystal, and biological systems, and that was developed by Jürg Hutter’s group at the University of Zurich with support by MARVEL. It has received the Scientific Originality Prize at the second Helmholtz Software Award, assigned by the Helmholtz Association, Germany’s largest research organization.

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.

Gramatte, a member of Empa's Laboratory for Advanced Materials Processing, was presented with the award by Empa Director Tanja Zimmermann during the recent Empa Leadership Forum. He received the recognition for his work on a recent publication in npj Computational Materials with MARVEL PI Vladyslav Turlo, where they introduced a new, fast atomistic simulation technique that leverages spectroscopy data, machine learning, and molecular dynamics techniques to model how hydrogen interacts with thin alumina films manufactured through atomic layer deposition (ALD). 

Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) Lab, an independent research institution based in Abu Dhabi specializing in data and computational sciences, is seeking a Senior Computational Scientist with a focus on Material Sciences. This position plays a pivotal role in establishing a new research group, cultivating and expanding a globally recognized team of researchers, and leading lab-wide initiatives at ADIA Lab and within the broader international community. The goal is to leverage computational science and data-driven discovery to accelerate breakthroughs in materials for energy, sustainability, and advanced technologies.

Two fully-funded PhD positions are currently being advertised in Computational Materials Physics at the University of Vienna (Austria). Detailed descriptions of the opportunities can be found in the official adverts below. The positions are advertised with an application deadline of 31 January 2026.

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.

 Changpeng Lin is among the recipients of the 2025 Royal Society Newton International Fellowship, that will allow him to research superconducting and electron fluid phases in strongly correlated materials. The research will work on the SNSF Synergia project "Hydronics" that involved several MARVEL members. On 5 December, Lin will also receive the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad. 

The MARVEL director received the annual recognition by Foresight Institute for his theoretical contribution to nanotechnology, in particular "for developing the theoretical and computational infrastructure that underpins modern atomically precise materials discovery”. Established in 1993, the Feynman Prizes recognize exceptional accomplishments in nanotechnology. It is awarded for excellence in theory and experiment to the researchers whose recent work has most advanced the achievement of Feynman’s goal for nanotechnology: molecular manufacturing, defined as the construction of atomically-precise products through the use of molecular machine systems. The other winner, for Experiment, is the 2016 Nobel laureate Ben L. Feringa. 

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. 

The 2025 Zonta Prize has been awarded to Zoë Holmes, an assistant professor of physics at EPFL and head of the Laboratory of Quantum Information and Computation and also a MARVEL PI since spring 2023. The prize recognizes every two years a promising young female scientist in Switzerland. In this article, discover Zoë’s career path and passions. And also how she will use the money of her prize mostly  in service of the community.