Giulia Galli


Giulia Galli is a condensed-matter physicist. She is the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. She is also the director of the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials. She is recognized for her contributions to the fields of computational condensed-matter, materials science, and nanoscience, most notably first principles simulations of materials and liquids, in particular materials for energy, properties of water, and excited state phenomena.

Education

Galli earned her PhD in physics in 1987 from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy. She held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the IBM Research Division in Zurich, Switzerland.

Career

Galli joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1991 first as senior researcher and then as senior scientist. She moved to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California in 1998, where she was the founding group leader of the Quantum Simulations Group that she led until 2005. From 2005 to 2013, Galli was Professor of Chemistry and Physics at University of California, Davis. While at UC Davis, she was the chair of Deep Carbon Observatory's Extreme Physics and Chemistry Directorate. In 2014 she joined the University of Chicago's Institute for Molecular Engineering as Liew Family Professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations. She is also Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. She is the director of the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials, which develops and disseminates interoperable open source software, data and validation procedures for the simulation and prediction of functional materials. MICCoM was established by the Department of Energy in 2015 and renewed in 2019.

Research and achievements

Galli's research activity focuses on the development and use and computational methods to understand and predict the behavior of solids, liquids and nanostructures from first principles. Her method developments include electronic and vibrational spectroscopies and thermal transport. Her theoretical studies of excited state properties of matter focus on the prediction of optimal systems for harvesting sunlight. Her work also involves simulation frameworks to investigate thermal transport in nanostructured materials, which are based on first principles molecular dynamics simulations and the Boltzmann transport equation. In addition to energy, Galli's research covers problems related to water resources at ambient conditions and in severe environments. Other areas of interest include phenomena and materials used to realize quantum information technologies. Galli's software activities are focused on the development of the WEST code and participation in the development of the Qbox code led by Francois Gygi at University of California, Davis, both of which are supported by MICCoM.

Honors and awards

Galli is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences; she is the recipient of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Science and Technology Award, the Department of Energy Award of Excellence, the 2018 Materials Research Society Theory Award for "the development of advanced first-principles simulation methods and their application to understanding, prediction, and design of complex nanostruuctured materials," the 2019 David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Materials Physics from the American Physical Society for "the invention of methods, especially for the enhancement of ab initio molecular dynamics, to understand, predict, and engineer the electronic and structural properties of materials," the 2019 Nelson W. Taylor Award, the 2019 Feynman prize for nanotechnology, and the 2019 Tommasoni-Chisesi prize.