Engineering materials for sustainable energy sources

Abstract: The development of advanced materials is widely recognized as a key element for new technologies, which are required to achieve a sustainable environment and provide clean and adequate energy for our planet. We discuss how the combination of advanced theory and computation, in close connection with state-of-the-art experiments, may lead to successful predictions and bottom up design of materials for energy applications.

Biography: Giulia Galli is the Liew Family Professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations in the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. She also holds a Senior Scientist position at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and she is a Senior Fellow of the UChicago/ANL Computational Institute. Prior to joining UChicago and ANL, 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 (1998-2005). She holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and of the AAAS. She is the recipient of an award of excellence from the Department of Energy (2000) and of the Science and Technology Award from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (2004). She is currently the director of MICCoM (Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials), established by DOE in 2015. Her research activity is focused on the development and use of theoretical and computational tools to understand and predict the properties and behavior of materials (solids, liquids and nanostructures) from first principles.