Michele Parrinello, Dott.

Michele Parrinello received his Laurea in physics from the University of Bologna in 1968. After working at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, the IBM research laboratory in Zurich, and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, he was appointed Professor of Computational Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 2001, a position he also holds at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano. In 2004 he was elected to Great Britain’s Royal Society. In 2011 he was awarded the Marcel Benoist Prize. Between 2014 and 2018, he was a member of the Scientific and Technical Committee of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). Since 2018, he has been a Senior Researcher, and since 2020, the Principal Investigator of the Atomistic Simulations research unit at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). In 2020 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute) in Chemistry. As of 2024, he has received over 150,000 scientific citations and has an h-index of 163, which is one of the highest among all scientists.

Over the last four decades, he has introduced many groundbreaking simulation methodologies which greatly widened the applicability and scope of atomistic simulations. The first of these approaches is the 1981 Parrinello-Rahman method aimed at performing molecular dynamics at constant pressure with adjustable simulation cells. This method enabled the simulation of solid-solid phase transitions in materials, and it is still widely used to this date. Simulations carried out around that time were based on empirical models for the interatomic interactions, a feature that limited their general applicability and predictive power. For this reason, in 1985, together with Prof. Roberto Car, he developed ab initio molecular dynamics (now known as the Car-Parrinello method), a landmark technique based on driving the nuclear dynamics using forces calculated on-the-fly from quantum-mechanical electronic-structure calculations based on Density Functional Theory.