Invited Speakers

Nicola Colonna is currently a postdoctoral research assistant in the Laboratory of Neutron Scattering and Imaging at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. He received his doctoral degree in 2014 from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), where he worked on the development and implementation of advanced exchange-correlation functionals to overcome common failures of standard density functional approximations. In 2015 he joined the group of Prof. Marzari at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where he contributed to the development of a novel functional framework for accurate and efficient first-principle predictions of spectral properties. His research focus is computational condensed matter physics with a particular emphasis on the methodological developments for accurate and high-performance simulations in the framework of density- and orbital-density-functional theories. He is a developer and contributor to the Quantum ESPRESSO software distribution. His scientific interests also includes the physics of iron-based superconductors, the description of van-der-Waals interaction in density functional theory, and the interplay between electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom in lead-halide perovskites.

Yaroslav Kvashnin is a graduate of the Ural Federal University, Russia, who began working with band structure calculations during the final years of his studies. Following graduation, he obtained his PhD at the ESRF under the supervision of Patrick Bruno and Luigi Genovese, and his thesis concerned first-principles studies of transition metals and their alloys under high pressure. This research was conducted in close collaboration with an experimental group and has led to an interesting discovery regarding the varying behaviour of spin and orbital moments upon compression [1]. After his PhD, Yaroslav joined the materials theory group at Uppsala University, first as a post-doc and then as a researcher. His main research interest lies in the first-principle modelling of electronic and magnetic properties and excitations in strongly correlated systems. He is actively working on the calculations of Heisenberg and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya exchange parameters for the realistic description of both collinear and non-collinear magnets [2,3]. Yaroslav is a laureate of the Benzelius prize (Kungliga Vetenskaps-Societeten i Uppsala, 2018) and the Wallmarkska prize (The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2019). He has been recently been awarded a grant from The Swedish Research Council (VR, 2020-2023) to conduct independent research in the field of 2D ferromagnets for magnonic and spintronic applications.

[1] Phys. Rev. Lett., 107, 237202 (2011)
[2] Physical Review B, 91, 125133 (2015) ; Phys. Rev. Lett., 116, 217202 (2016)
[3] Nature Physics, 10, 202–206 (2014) ; Phys. Rev. Lett., 119, 167201 (2017)

Anna Galler studied Physics at Vienna University of Technology (Austria), where she obtained her MSc in 2013 and her PhD in 2017. During her PhD, she developed a new method for strongly correlated materials, the ab-initio dynamical vertex approximation, which incorporates electronic correlations on all length scales. After her graduation in 2017, Anna moved to Paris as a postdoctoral fellow at Centre de Physique Théorique, Ecole Polytechnique (France). Since January 2019, she is an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow at the same institution. Her expertise and research interests are focused on strongly correlated materials: rare-earth permanent magnets and correlated pigment materials. She also has an interest in fundamental physical aspects and theory development for strongly correlated electron systems and beyond.

Nicolas Tancogne-Dejean, born in 1989, received his doctoral degree in 2015 from the Ecole Polytechnique, France, for his work with Dr. Valérie Véniard in the field on nonlinear optics from crystal surfaces. Since 2016, he has held a postdoctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg, Germany, in the theory department of Angel Rubio. He is working on the strong-field electron dynamics in matter, as well as optical properties of optically-driven strongly correlated materials using real-time time-dependent density functional theory. In his career, he has developed a TDDFT code for second-harmonic generation based on perturbation theory and is now one of the main developers of the real-space real-time TDDFT code Octopus. As a member of the ETSF, he was the main organizer of the ETSF Young Researchers' Meeting in Paris (2015).

Bingqing Cheng works as a junior research fellow at Trinity College, the University of Cambridge. She completed her undergrad and master's degrees at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Hong Kong, and obtained a PhD in Materials Science from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. Bingqing's research involves using computer simulations to understand and predict material properties, including phenomena and problems such as interfaces, nucleation, crystal plasticity, nuclear quantum effects, and thermodynamic stabilities of materials as well as crystal defects. Recently, Bingqing has been focusing on exploiting machine-learning methods to extend the scope of atomistic simulations.

Fulvio Paleari obtained his BSc and MSc in Physics at the University of Milano-Bicocca (2015), and a PhD at the University of Luxembourg, under the supervision of Prof. Ludger Wirtz (2019). He is currently working as a postdoc at the Istituto di Struttura della Materia (ISM-CNR) in Rome. His work concerns the theoretical spectroscopy of layered materials, and in particular neutral excitations (excitons) in conjunction with lattice vibrations (phonons). His research walks the line between theoretical and computational many-body physics, seeking out both fundamental mechanisms and specific applications, and he is also a developer of the Yambo many-body code.

Following her graduation from the University of Stuttgart in 2009, Konstanze Hahn moved to Switzerland where she persued her PhD studies at the University of Zurich under the supervision of Prof. J. Hutter. This is where she gained the basis of her research interest in computational chemistry and physics using density functional theory (DFT) calculations of solid state materials. For her first postdoc position, Dr. Hahn moved to the University of Cagliari where she worked with Prof. L. Colombo on molecular dynamics simulations of SiGe materials and nanocrystalline graphene, focusing on their thermoelectric properties. Another two years' postdoc activity followed at the Aix-Marseille University in France, again with a focus on first-principle calculations for magnetic MnCoGe systems. From 2017 to 2019, Dr. Hahn worked at the Institut de Ciencia de Materials de Barcelona (Icmab) with Prof. M. Stengel, implementing new models in DFT codes to improve the phonon description of dielectric materials. In 2019 she moved back to Cagliari as faculty staff and her research now focuses on the description of thermoelectric properties by first-principle methods in nanostructured materials, such as SiGe nanowires.