Invitation to the Walter Kohn Prize Award ceremony on Thursday 12 January 2023 at 15:30 in BLH

[ICTP Director]

_*Invitation to the Walter Kohn Prize Award Ceremony, Thursday 12 
January 2023, at 15:30,  Budinich Lecture Hall*_

Dear All,

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 
<https://indico.ictp.it/event/10056/> 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.

Best regards,
Director's Office, ICTP