Anatole earned his Ph.D. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in 2005 and has held postdoctoral appointments at University of California, Los Angeles, New York University, and the Max-Planck Institute (Germany). His research proposal for the Truman Fellowship, “Multiscale schemes for the predictive description and virtual engineering of materials,” brings together skills he’s acquired in the course of his scientific development for the virtual design of tailored materials.
This fellowship is providing me with the exceptional opportunity to independently assemble a wide variety of computational tools, physical theories, and well-controlled assumptions in order to identify chemical compounds with targeted characteristics. As the number of potentially stable compounds is mind-bogglingly large, such an endeavor can also be viewed as attempting to tailor materials by leveraging sophisticated optimization algorithms in a challengingly structured space of candidates.
It has been great to realize that Sandia does not only provide generous funding to pursue my proposed research, it also offers a stimulating and exciting scientific working environment and infrastructure, allowing me to frequently interact with, and gather crucial insights and advice from, many other highly trained scientists.