Giulia Galli

Marveling at materials through in-silico lenses

November 13th, 2019 | 4:15pm | Forum Rolex


Materials are enablers of innovation in science and technology and have brought about revolutionary changes to society: familiar examples are the materials used in transistors and in batteries that have become omnipresent in our daily lives.

In this Campus Lecture — also a MARVEL Distinguished Lecture — Giulia Galli will tell an atomic-level story of how we can predict and design materials for next generation technologies, by combining theories based on quantum mechanics, software running on high performance computers and ever-growing amounts of data. 

They aim to tackle two outstanding challenges: designing sustainable materials to efficiently capture solar energy and enable technologies deployable in both developed and developing countries, and inventing materials to build radically novel sensors and computers, to move in earnest into the quantum information age.

Giulia Galli is the Liew Family professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations in the Pritzker School of  Molecular Engineering and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. She also holds a Senior Scientist position at Argonne National Laboratory, where she is the director the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials.  Prior to joining UChicago, she was Professor of Chemistry and Physics at UC Davis (2005-2013) and the head of the Quantum Simulations group at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL, 1998-2005). She holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the International School of Advanced Studies in Italy.

She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the LLNL Science and Technology Award, the US Department of Energy Award of Excellence, the Materials Research Society Theory Award, the APS David Adler Lectureship in Materials Physics, the Feynman Nanotechnology Prize in Theory, the medal of the Schola Physica Romana and the Tomassoni-Chisesi award by the Sapienza University of Rome.