Abstract:  
A brief overview will be presented of the successes and open problems in predicting materials properties from first principles, using quantum simulations and high performance computations. Materials for energy and the environment will be the focus of our applications.

Biography:
Giulia Galli recently joined the University of Chicago as the Liew Family professor of electronic structure and simulations in the Institute for Molecular Engineering. She previously spent eight years at the University of California, Davis where she was Professor of Chemistry and Physics. She holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy. Prior to joining the UCD faculty, Giulia Galli was the head of the Quantum Simulations group at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), and she was elected chair of the Division of Computational Physics of the APS in 2006. She is the recipient of the Department of Energy award of excellence (2000) for “Technical excellence in computing”, and of the Science and Technology Award from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (2004). She recently served as chair of the Extreme Physics and Chemistry of Carbon Directorate of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) in 2010-2013. Her research activity is focused on the development and use of theoretical and computational methods  to understand and predict the properties and behavior of materials (solids, liquids and nanostructures) from first principles.