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ICTP will honour the recipient of the 2024 Walter Kohn Prize, Rafael Gonzalez Hernandez, during a ceremony to be held Thursday 9 January at 16:00 in the Centre's Budinich Lecture Hall.
Rafael Gonzalez Hernandez, a professor at the Universidad del Norte, Colombia, was awarded the 2024 prize for his ground-breaking work in uncovering the physics and properties of altermagnetism, an unconventional magnetic state of matter, and for his ab initio predictions of related effects in real materials. More details about the significance of his work are available here.
The prize ceremony will be livestreamed. It is being held during the Centre’s 22nd International Workshop on Computational Physics and Materials Science: Total Energy and Force Methods.
Professor Gonzalez Hernandez earned his master's and PhD degrees at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He has received a number of accolades for his work, including a research fellowship from the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation, Germany; the TWAS Prize for Young Scientists in Developing Countries in the area of physics, granted by the Colombian Academy of Sciences and The World Academy of Sciences; he was an ICTP Junior Associate in 2015. He is a Corresponding Member of the Colombian Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences.
The Walter Kohn Prize was established in 2016 by ICTP and the Quantum ESPRESSO Foundation (QEF) in honour of Chemistry Nobel Laureate Walter Kohn, a leading condensed matter physicist who developed density functional theory (DFT), a method that drastically reduces the amount of computing power needed to model the properties of complex materials, without compromising the accuracy of a model’s simulations. DFT has already had a big impact on a wide variety of fields, including chemistry, molecular physics, medicine and engineering. It also has opened the door to contributions from scientists from disadvantaged countries who have no access to huge supercomputers, due to its low computing costs and the wide availability of open source modeling software. The prize is awarded jointly by ICTP and the QEF every two years.
The Quantum ESPRESSO Foundation is home to some of the most popular and internationally recognised open-source codes for quantum-mechanical materials modelling, mainly based on density functional theory. ICTP and QEF regularly organise schools on computer simulations of materials, especially in developing countries.
