Michele Parrinello | |
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Born | Messina, Italy | 7 September 1945
Awards | Fellow of the Royal Society EPS Europhysics Prize (1990) Dirac Prize (2009) Sidney Fernbach Award (2009) Marcel Benoist Prize (2011) Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences (2017) Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute) (2021) European Chemistry Gold Medal (2020) [1] |
Michele Parrinello (born 7 September 1945) is an Italian physicist particularly known for his work in molecular dynamics (the computer simulation of physical movements of atoms and molecules). Parrinello and Roberto Car were awarded the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and the Sidney Fernbach Award in 2009 for their continuing development of the Car–Parrinello method, first proposed in their seminal 1985 paper, [2] "Unified Approach for Molecular Dynamics and Density-Functional Theory". [3] They have continued to receive awards for this breakthrough, most recently the Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences [4] and the 2021 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry. [5]
Parrinello also co-authored highly cited publications on "polymorphic transitions in single crystals" [6] and "canonical sampling through velocity rescaling." [7]
Michele Parrinello was born in Messina (Sicily) and received his Laurea in physics from the University of Bologna in 1968. After working at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, the IBM research laboratory in Zurich, and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, he was appointed Professor of Computational Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 2001, a position he also holds at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano. [8] In 2004 he was elected to Great Britain's Royal Society. In 2011 he was awarded the Marcel Benoist Prize. [9] In 2020 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute) in Chemistry. [5] As of 2023, he has received over 140,000 scientific citations and has an h-index of 162, which is one of the highest among all scientists. As of 2023, at the age of 78, there are still 6 PhD students working in his group. [10]
Quantum chemistry, also called molecular quantum mechanics, is a branch of physical chemistry focused on the application of quantum mechanics to chemical systems, particularly towards the quantum-mechanical calculation of electronic contributions to physical and chemical properties of molecules, materials, and solutions at the atomic level. These calculations include systematically applied approximations intended to make calculations computationally feasible while still capturing as much information about important contributions to the computed wave functions as well as to observable properties such as structures, spectra, and thermodynamic properties. Quantum chemistry is also concerned with the computation of quantum effects on molecular dynamics and chemical kinetics.
Chemical physics is a subdiscipline of chemistry and physics that investigates physicochemical phenomena using techniques from atomic and molecular physics and condensed matter physics; it is the branch of physics that studies chemical processes from the point of view of physics. While at the interface of physics and chemistry, chemical physics is distinct from physical chemistry in that it focuses more on the characteristic elements and theories of physics. Meanwhile, physical chemistry studies the physical nature of chemistry. Nonetheless, the distinction between the two fields is vague, and scientists often practice in both fields during the course of their research.
The Università della Svizzera italiana, sometimes referred to as the University of Lugano in English-speaking contexts, is a public Swiss university established in 1995, with campuses in Lugano, Mendrisio and Bellinzona. USI is the only university in Switzerland where the official language is Italian, but many of its programs are in English.
William Esco Moerner, also known as W. E. Moerner, is an American physical chemist and chemical physicist with current work in the biophysics and imaging of single molecules. He is credited with achieving the first optical detection and spectroscopy of a single molecule in condensed phases, along with his postdoc, Lothar Kador. Optical study of single molecules has subsequently become a widely used single-molecule experiment in chemistry, physics and biology. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Car–Parrinello molecular dynamics or CPMD refers to either a method used in molecular dynamics or the computational chemistry software package used to implement this method.
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This is a list of computer programs that are predominantly used for molecular mechanics calculations.
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Curt Franklin Wittig is a professor of chemistry and the holder of the Paul A. Miller Chair in the college of letters, arts, and sciences at the University of Southern California (USC).
The Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences is an award given to an individual researcher in chemistry. The prize, awarded biennially, consists of a citation, a medal, and a monetary award of $250,000. The prize is awarded by The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc. to an individual in a selected area of chemistry "to recognize exceptional and original research that has advanced the field in a major way."
Roberto Car is an Italian physicist and the Ralph W. Dornte *31 Professor in Chemistry at Princeton University, where he is also a faculty member in the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials. He conducts research on the simulation of molecular dynamics phenomena.
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TeraChem is a computational chemistry software program designed for CUDA-enabled Nvidia GPUs. The initial development started at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was subsequently commercialized. It is currently distributed by PetaChem, LLC, located in Silicon Valley. As of 2020, the software package is still under active development.
The following timeline starts with the invention of the modern computer in the late interwar period.
Martin Quack is a German physical chemist and spectroscopist; he is a professor at ETH Zürich.
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Ursula Röthlisberger is a professor of computational chemistry at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. She works on density functional theory using mixed quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical methods. She is an associate editor of the American Chemical Society Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.