Invitation to the Walter Kohn Prize Award ceremony on Thursday 9 January 2025 at 16:00 in BLH & Luigi Stasi Lecture Hall

[ICTP Director]

Dear All,
ICTP and the Quantum ESPRESSO Foundation have announced the awarding of 
their 2024 Walter Kohn Prize to Rafael Gonzalez Hernandez, a professor 
at the Universidad del Norte, Colombia, for his ground-breaking work in 
uncovering the physics and properties of altermagnetism, an 
unconventional magnetic state of matter, and for his ab initio 
predictions of related effects in real materials.

Using density functional theory, a quantum-mechanical ab initio 
simulation method with which researchers can compute a wide variety of 
properties of atomic systems, Gonzalez Hernandez's work has paved the 
way for experimental validation of altermagnetism, which is considered a 
new branch of magnetism.

The ceremony will be held on 9 January 2025 at ICTP, during the Centre’s 
22nd International Workshop on Computational Physics and Materials 
Science: Total Energy and Force Methods.

Professor Rafael Gonzalez Hernandez earned his master's and PhD degrees 
at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He has received a number of 
accolades for his work, including a research fellowship from the 
Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation, Germany; the TWAS Prize for Young 
Scientists in Developing Countries in the area of physics, granted by 
the Colombian Academy of Sciences and The World Academy of Sciences; he 
was an ICTP Junior Associate in 2015. He is a Corresponding Member of 
the Colombian Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences.

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.

All are welcome to attend. Light refreshments will be served in the 
lobby after the event.

The Ceremony will also be livestreamed at http://ictp.it/livestream.

The live-stream can also be followed in the Luigi Stasi Lecture Hall.


Best regards,
Director's Office