The Materials Research Society (MRS) has named Giulia Galli, The University of Chicago, as the recipient of the 2018 Materials Theory Award “for the development of advanced first-principles simulation methods and their application to the understanding, prediction and design of complex nanostructured materials.” Galli will be recognized at the 2018 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston. The Materials Theory Award, endowed by Toh-Ming Lu and Gwo-Ching Wang, “recognizes exceptional advances made by materials theory to the fundamental understanding of the structure and behavior of materials.”
Galli is the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering and professor of chemistry at The University of Chicago and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. She is recognized for her contributions to the fields of computational condensed matter, materials science, and nanoscience, most notably, first-principles simulations of materials and liquids.
Over the years, Galli has developed a number of novel theoretical and computational methods that have greatly extended the scope of ab initio molecular dynamics. She also has developed linear scaling algorithms for electronic-structure calculations and methods based on many body perturbation theory to study spectroscopic properties of materials. These methods are now implemented in several codes. Galli made many predictions of the properties of liquids, solids, and nanostructures that have been confirmed by experiments.
Galli received her PhD degree in physics from the International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy. She held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the IBM Research Division in Zurich, Switzerland. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the recipient of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Science and Technology Award, the US Department of Energy Award of Excellence, and the American Physical Society 2019 David Adler Lectureship Award in Materials Physics.
