The 2022 Walter
Kohn Prize for quantum-mechanical materials and molecular modeling
has been awarded to Debashree Ghosh, of the Indian Association for
the Cultivation of Science in Kolkata, India. The prize recognises
her "pathbreaking work in developing novel quantum chemical tools
for materials design and the study of biological function.
Combining techniques from physics, chemistry and biology, her work
has made important advances in our understanding of strongly
correlated materials and complex biological systems."
The ceremony will be held on
12 January 2023 at ICTP,
during the Centre’s
21st
International Workshop on Computational Physics and Materials
Science: Total Energy and Force Methods and will include an
invited talk by Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann.
Debashree Ghosh earned her MS degree in chemical sciences from the
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 2005, and her PhD
degree in chemistry at Cornell University in 2010. She is
currently a professor at the School of Chemical Sciences, Indian
Association for the Cultivation of Science. Her research focuses
on the development and application of methods to understand
photophysical processes in biological and condensed phases.
The Walter Kohn Prize was established in March 2016 by ICTP and
the Quantum ESPRESSO Foundation (QEF) in honour of Chemistry Nobel
Laureate Walter Kohn, a leading condensed matter physicist who
developed density functional theory (DFT), a method that
drastically reduces the amount of computing power needed to model
the properties of complex materials, without compromising the
accuracy of a model’s simulations. DFT has already had a big
impact on a wide variety of fields, including chemistry, molecular
physics, medicine and engineering. It also has opened the door to
contributions from scientists from disadvantaged countries who
have no access to huge supercomputers, due to its low computing
costs and the wide availability of open source modeling software.
The prize is awarded jointly by ICTP and the QEF every two years,
but was not awarded in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak.
All are welcome to attend. Light refreshments will be served in
the lobby after the event.
The Ceremony will
also be livestreamed from the ICTP website.