MARVEL - Materials’ Revolution: Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials

The National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) MARVEL is a centre on Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials created and founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It is coordinated  by EPFL and directed by Nicola Marzari, and it involves 25 principal investigators across 11 Swiss Institutions - the two Federal Polytechnics in Lausanne and Zurich (EPFL and ETHZ), five universities in Basel, Fribourg, Geneva, Svizzera Italiana, and Zurich (UNIBAS, UNIFR, UNIGE, USI, UZH), the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), the research laboratories of IBM Zurich, and the two national laboratories PSI and EMPA (the Paul Scherrer Institute, and the Materials Science and Technology Research Institute).

The NCCR MARVEL aims at bringing about a scientific and technological revolution, whereby discoveries and inventions will come from quantum mechanical simulations and the information and communication technologies (ICT) of big data. With computers becoming more and more powerful, it is now possible to screen rapidly for tens of thousands of materials at the same time. This computational approach to the discovery and development of materials will be applied to the fields of energy, ICT and pharmaceuticals.