21/10/2024
The award, promoted by the Institute of structure of matter (Cnr-Ism), is presented annually by an international jury to two scientists having achieved outstanding breakthroughs in the field of Science of Materials in the last 5 years.
The award ceremony will take place at the Marconi Hall of the National Research Council (P.le Aldo Moro 7 in Rome), and will be broadcast live on the social media channels of Cnr-Ism on 17th december at 3:00 PM (CET)
For the Senior PRISM category, the Prize has been awarded to Alán Aspuru-Guzik - Professor of Chemistry and Computer Science at the University of Toronto - CANADA.
For the Junior PRISM category, the Prize has been awarded to Nikita Kavokine - Assistant Professor at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) - SWITZERLAND
Alán Aspuru-Guzik
Professor of Chemistry and Computer Science at the University of Toronto and is also the Canada 150 Research Chair in Theoretical Chemistry and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute. He is a CIFAR Lebovic Fellow co-directing the Accelerated Decarbonization program. Alán also holds a Google Industrial Research Chair in Quantum Computing. Alán is the director of the Acceleration Consortium, a University of Toronto-based strategic initiative that aims to gather researchers from industry, government, and academia around pre-competitive research topics related to the lab of the future.
Alán began his independent career at Harvard University in 2006 and was a Full Professor at Harvard University from 2013-2018. He received his B.Sc. from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, where he was also a postdoctoral fellow from 2005-2006.
Alán conducts research in the interfaces of quantum information, machine learning and chemistry. He was a pioneer in the development of algorithms and experimental implementations of quantum computers and quantum simulators dedicated to chemical systems. He has studied the role of quantum coherence in the transfer of excitonic energy in photosynthetic complexes and has accelerated the discovery by calculating organic semiconductors, organic photovoltaic energy, organic batteries and organic light-emitting diodes. He has worked on molecular representations and generative models for the automatic learning of molecular properties. Currently, Alán is interested in automation and "autonomous" chemical laboratories for accelerating scientific discovery.
Among other recognitions, he received the Google Focused Award for Quantum Computing, the Sloan Research Fellowship, The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award, and was selected as one of the best innovators under the age of 35 by the MIT Technology Review. He is an elected fellow of the American Physical Society, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and received the Early Career Award in Theoretical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. Alán appeared as one of the top 100 most powerful Canadians in 2024 by the Maclean’s Magazine under the AI Category.
Alán is editor-in-chief of the journal Digital Discovery, as well as co-founder of Zapata AI, Kebotix, Intrepid Labs, and Axiomatic AI.
Nikita Kavokine
Nikita Kavokine’s research is in the field of nanofluidics – the study of fluid transport at the smallest scales, where the continuum of hydrodynamics meets the atomic, and even the quantum nature of matter. Nikita graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS, Paris) in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a master’s degree in theoretical physics. He then completed a PhD at ENS, in the group of Prof. Lydéric Bocquet, where he did both theoretical and experimental work on many-body effects in nanoscale fluid transport, graduating in 2021. Nikita then spent a year as a Research Fellow in the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics, working with Prof. Antoine Georges on numerical approaches to disordered quantum systems. In 2022, he joined the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, where he was a Group Leader in the Department of Molecular Spectroscopy.
Since 2024, Nikita is an Assistant Professor at EPFL (Switzerland), where he leads the Quantum Plumbing Lab – an interdisciplinary laboratory which studies quantum effects in nanoscale fluid transport and leverages them to address sustainability and renewable energy challenges.
Per informazioni:
Ufficio Comunicazione
Cnr - Istituto di struttura della materia
comunicazione@ism.cnr.it
Vedi anche: