MARVEL Distinguished Lectures

MARVEL Distinguished Lecture by Prof. Peter Littlewood (University of Chicago / Argonne National Laboratory), recorded on March 6, 2017 at EPFL. Video recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSqnkTlv44k (CC BY-SA 4.0, Materials Cloud). Video file not yet attached.

**Hannes Jonsson**

*Date: 11 November 2025*

The 41st NCCR MARVEL Distinguished Lecture will be given by Prof. Hannes Jónsson (University of Iceland). He will be presenting a lecture entitled: "Calculations of excited electronic states using saddle point searches and self-interaction corrected density functionals, with comparison to neural-network selective configuration interaction".[slides][][endslides]

39th NCCR MARVEL Distinguished Lecture will be given by Prof. Gerbrand Ceder (University of California, Berkeley). He will be presenting a lecture entitled: 'How the future of science may look: AI and autonomous laboratories for materials synthesis'.

40th NCCR MARVEL Distinguished Lecture will be given by Prof. Alexandre Tkatchenko, University of Luxembourg. He will be presenting a lecture entitled: "Realizing Schrödinger's dream with AI-enabled molecular simulations".

NCCR MARVEL Distinguished Lecture will be given by Prof. Dominika Zgid, University of Michigan. She will be presenting a lecture entitled: 'Ab-initio Green's functions methods for molecules and solids. What accuracy can we reach?'

38th NCCR MARVEL Distinguished Lecture will be given by Prof. David Srolovitz, The University of Hong Kong. He will be presenting a lecture entitled: "Grain boundaries are natural Brownian ratchets: directional GB anisotropy".

NCCR MARVEL Distinguished Lecture will be given by Prof. Massimiliano Di Ventra, University of California, San Diego. He will be presenting a lecture entitled: "MemComputing: when memory becomes a computing tool"

3rd MARVEL Distinguished Lecture (MDL) - Sidney Yip
Recorded on August 31, 2015.
Apologies for the bad audio for the first minute, it ends at 0:00:55.

Abstract — A frontier in theory, modeling and simulation of materials exists at the mesoscale. The challenge is to predict and explain properties and behavior at the macroscale (usually from experiments) using model and simulation at the nano-level. At stake is the determination of the controlling mechanisms and the ability to manipulate the functionality of specific materials. Conceptually it is also the key to expand on the notion of self-organized criticality. We consider examples of materials aging phenomena where the challenge lies in dealing with the slow dynamics involved and bridging time scales in multiscale and multiphysics simulations. These examples include glass viscosity, creep in crystalline and amorphous solids, and cement setting and durability.

About the speaker — After receiving all his degrees at the University of Michigan, Sidney Yip served on the MIT faculty for 50 years, the last five as emeritus, with research first in theoretical studies of particle and fluid transport, and later in atomistic modeling and simulation of materials. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, he has received awards from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Nuclear Materials. Recently he completed a text Nuclear Radiation Interactions (World Scientific, Singapore, 2014).

4th MARVEL Distinguished Lecture (MDL) - Leonid Levitov
Recorded on October 13, 2015.

Abstract — Since the discovery that electrons in graphene behave as massless Dirac fermions, the single-atom-thick material has become a fertile playground for testing exotic predictions of quantum electrodynamics, such as Klein tunneling and the fractional quantum Hall effect. Now add to that list atomic collapse, the spontaneous formation of electrons and positrons in the electrostatic field of a super-heavy atomic nucleus. The atomic collapse was predicted to manifest itself in quasi-stationary states which have complex-valued energies and which decay rapidly. However, the atoms created artificially in laboratory have nuclear charge only up to Z = 118, which falls short of the predicted threshold for collapse. Interest in this problem has been revived with the advent of graphene, where because of a large fine structure constant the collapse is expected for Z of order unity. In this talk we will discuss the symmetry aspects of atomic collapse, in particular the anomalous breaking of scale invariance. We will also describe recent experiments that use scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) to probe atomic collapse near STM-controlled artificial compound nuclei.

About the speaker — Leonid Levitov published over a hundred refereed papers and reviews in the fields of quantum transport, nano-electronics, solid-state quantum computing, cold atoms, quantum noise, growth and pattern formation, which can be found at the home page http://www.mit.edu/~levitov. He pioneered in the theory of quasicrystals, orderly materials with non-crystallographic symmetries discovered in 1985. Leonid co‐authored a theory explaining the structural properties of quasi-crystals by introducing the concept of a structure projected from a high-dimensional periodic structure. In the 90's, he pioneered in the theory of quantum noise. Leonid formulated the counting statistics approach, which evolved into a new tool in the field of quantum transport. In 1993, he developed the concept of coherent current pulses allowing the transmission of electrical signals in a noise‐free fashion. These pulses, observed in 2013 and dubbed 'levitons', have become the basis of electron optics. In the last 10 years, Leonid developed theory of electronic properties of graphene, a newly discovered two‐dimensional electron system.

5th MARVEL Distinguished Lecture (MDL) - Pierre Villars
Recorded on November 11, 2015.

Abstract — Confronted with the explosion of computing power, as well as materials data information Gray proposed in 2009 the Fourth Paradigm of Science: Data-Intensive Discovery through Data Exploration (eScience), which means to electronically unify experiment, theory and computation. The executive office of the president National Science and Technology Council of the United States has launched mid-2011 the whitepaper Materials Genome Initiative for Global Competitiveness having as major aim to shorten the time between discovery of advanced materials and its industrial application by at least a factor two. In 2014 JST has started a Japanese Project called Materials Informatics, Materials Design by Digital Data Driven Method. In the same year SNSF (Switzerland) has started the NCCR MARVEL Initiative called Material’s Revolution: Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials.
Reflecting these new trends, many ideas have been proposed to explore new dimensions trying to derive interesting knowledge from a simple collection of many data. To show a clear direction for such trends, it is necessary to draw a roadmap by taking advantage of scientific data, namely in case of this publication we select scientific data on materials.

6th MARVEL Distinguished Lecture (MDL) - Gerbrand Ceder
Recorded on January 25, 2016.

Abstract — Novel materials design is a critical capability to address several urgent societal problems. But materials development is difficult and time consuming due to the lack of quantitative information on the properties, synthesis and behavior of novel materials. The confluence of high-throughput computing, big data, and data analytics is likely to transform the way materials development is done in the next decade. I will show several examples of the impact of the Materials Genome in developing new materials and nucleating new ideas in materials science. As one example, the Materials Project has as its objective to use high-throughput first principles computations on an unparalleled scale to provide basic materials property data on all known and many potential new inorganic compounds, thereby accelerating the search for new materials.
I believe it is possible to within ten years determine most of the intrinsic properties of all known compounds, thereby generating the Materials Genome. Finally, I will also describe how this will displace the bottleneck of materials development towards materials synthesis, and show some initial work we have started to develop a quantitative theory of materials synthesis, so that materials development can be accelerated all the way from design to device integration.

About the speaker — Gerbrand Ceder is The Chancellor’s Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley. He received an engineering degree from the University of Leuven, Belgium, and a Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991. Between 1991 and 2015 was a Professor in Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Ceder’s research interests lie in the computationally driven design of novel materials for energy generation and storage. He has published over 350 scientific papers, and holds several U.S. patents. He has served on MIT’s Energy Council as well as on several DOE committees, including the workgroup preparing the Basic Needs for Electrical Energy Storage report, and has advised the government’s Office of Science and Technology Policy on the role of computation in materials development, leading to the Materials Genome Initiative. He is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society and a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received the MRS Gold Medal, the Battery Research Award from the Electrochemical Society, the Career Award from the National Science Foundation, and the Robert Lansing Hardy Award from The Metals, Minerals and Materials Society, as well as several teaching awards. He is a co-founder of Computational Modeling Consultants, Pellion Technologies, and The Materials Project.

7th MARVEL Distinguished Lecture (MDL) - Clare Grey
Recorded on October 26, 2016.

Abstract — This talk will describe recent applications of NMR spectroscopy and pair distribution function (PDF) analysis of total scattering data to study electrode materials for energy storage and conversion. In particular, the focus will be on areas of our work where the combination of theory and experiment has been critical for interpreting experimental data and/or for understanding electronic structure. The use of 6,7Li, 23Na and more recently 17O NMR spectroscopy to investigate structural disorder, defects and dynamics in paramagnetic materials will be described. Examples include the development of methods to understand how Mg substitution in Na manganates affects rate performance of a series of layered phases in Na-ion batteries, to quantify stacking faults in intergrowth structures, and to investigate the transport mechanism in the ionic and electronic conductor La2NiO4+. Many battery and supercapacitor materials are amorphous and methods to extract structure from these highly disordered systems and to determine the mechanisms for charge storage will be described.

About the speaker — Clare P. Grey is the Geoffrey Moorhouse-Gibson Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Pembroke College Cambridge. She received a BA and D. Phil. (1991) in Chemistry from the University of Oxford. After post-doctoral fellowships in the Netherlands and at DuPont CR&D in Wilmington, DE, joined the faculty at Stony Brook University (SBU) in 1994, moving Cambridge in 2009, maintaining an adjunct position at SBU. Her recent honours and awards include the 2011 Royal Society Kavli Lecture and Medal for work relating to the Environment/Energy and the Davy Award (2014), and the Arfvedson-Schlenk-Preis from the German Chemical Society (2015). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Her current research interests include the use of solid state NMR and diffraction-based methods to determine structure-function relationships in materials for energy storage (batteries and supercapacitors), conversion (fuel cells) and carbon capture.