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Materials Theory Award

• 2011 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit

• November 28 - December 2, 2011
• Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA
• Meeting Chairs: Cammy R. Abernathy, Paul V. Braun, Masashi Kawasaki, Kathryn J. Wahl

Alex Zunger - University of Colorado, Boulder

Wednesday, November 30, 6:30 pm
Sheraton Hotel, Level 2, Grand Ballroom

Alex Zunger
University of Colorado, Boulder

The Materials Theory Award will be presented to Alex Zunger on Wednesday, November 30 at 6:30 pm. in the Sheraton Hotel Grand Ballroom. The Materials Theory Award, endowed by Toh-Ming Lu and Gwo-Ching Wang, “recognizes exceptional advances made by materials theory to the fundamental understanding of the structure and behavior of materials.”  

"For his development of the inverse band structure approach to materials by design and the foundational developments of methods of first-principles theory of solids, leading to innovative and transformative studies of renewable-energy materials and nanostructures."

Alex Zunger received a PhD degree from Tel Aviv University, Israel, followed by a postdoctoral research position at Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley. At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), he established the Solid State Theory Group, where he has mentored over 70 postdoctoral fellows.

He has made seminal contributions as a theorist working in the area of condensed matter and materials physics. He made foundational contributions to the development of the pseudopotential total energy approach to predict and explain properties of solids and to the development of exchange-and-correlation functionals for computing electron-electron interactions in density-functional theory. He was a contributor to the fields of semiconductor alloys, complex semiconductors.

He has authored numerous high-impact articles, leading to an “h-number” of over 90. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society. Other honors include the John Bardeen Award of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS), the Rahman Award of the APS, the Tomassoni Prize, Physics Medal of the Scola Romana di Physica, and the Guttenberg Award of Science.