Rate My Professor Nicola Marzari

Nicola Marzari is the Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, a position he assumed in September 2025. This historic chair, established in 1871, has been held by distinguished physicists including James Clerk Maxwell, J. J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, and Nevill Mott. A Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Marzari obtained his Laurea in Physics summa cum laude from the University of Trieste in 1992 and his PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge in 1996, advised by Prof. Michael C. Payne. His postdoctoral research was conducted at Rutgers University as an NSF Fellow under Prof. David Vanderbilt. Subsequent appointments included research faculty at George Mason University and the Naval Research Laboratory, research staff at Princeton University, and tenured positions at MIT as AMAX Assistant Professor of Computational Materials Science (2001–2005), Associate Professor (2005–2011), and Toyota Chair of Materials Engineering (2009–2011). He held the inaugural Statutory Chair of Materials Modelling at the University of Oxford (2010–2011), directing the Materials Modelling Laboratory, before joining EPFL as Chair of Theory and Simulation of Materials (2011–2025), Director of the National Centre for Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials (MARVEL) since 2014, and Head of the Laboratory for Materials Simulations at the Paul Scherrer Institut.

Marzari's research centers on the development and application of novel electronic-structure theories, algorithms, and software to understand, predict, and design properties of complex materials and states of matter through first-principles quantum mechanical simulations. Key contributions include maximally localized Wannier functions (Reviews of Modern Physics, 2012), Koopmans-compliant functionals for accurate spectral properties, and microscopic theories of transport such as relaxons for thermal conduction. His work bridges length and time scales from atoms to mesoscopic models and incorporates machine learning and artificial intelligence in scientific discovery. He has pioneered open-access infrastructures like AiiDA for workflows and Materials Cloud for data dissemination, supporting over 4,000 scientific publications annually. More than 30 alumni from his groups hold faculty positions worldwide. Marzari has received the 2026 American Physical Society David Adler Lectureship in Materials Physics, 2025 Foresight Institute Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (Theory category), American Physical Society Fellowship, 2022 PRACE HPC Excellence Award (inaugural), 2023 Swiss National Prize for Open Research Data, and 2018 IBM Faculty Award.