Invitation to the Walter Kohn Prize Award ceremony on Thursday 10 January at 9:00 in BLH

[ICTP Director]

_*Invitation to the Walter Kohn Prize Award Ceremony, 10 January 2019, 
at 9:00 am,  Budinich Lecture Hall*_

Dear All,

We are pleased to announce that the Walter Kohn Prize 
<https://www.ictp.it/about-ictp/prizes-awards/walter-kohn-prize.aspx> 
for quantum-mechanical materials and molecular modeling has been awarded 
to Professor Gabriel Merino, a researcher from Centro de Investigación y 
de Estudios Avanzados (Cinvestav), Unidad Mérida, Mexico. The prize 
recognizes his pioneering work on predicting and understanding novel 
systems that violate standard chemical paradigms, and for generalizing 
and broadening the scope of concepts such as aromaticity, coordination 
and the chemical bond.

The ceremony will take place in the Budinich Lecture Hall at 9:00 hrs 
during the 19th International Workshop on Computational Physics and 
Material Science: Total Energy and Force Methods (smr 3266)

The prize was established in March 2016 by ICTP and the Quantum ESPRESSO 
Foundatio <http://foundation.quantum-espresso.org>n (QEF) in honor 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.

More information on the ceremony is available at: 
https://www.ictp.it/about-ictp/media-centre/news/2018/12/kohn-prize-2018.aspx

You are all most cordially invited to attend.

Best regards,

Director's Office, ICTP