Marco Bernardi

Marco Bernardi is assistant professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at Caltech. Prior to moving to the U.S.for graduate school, Marco obtained his BS from University of Rome La Sapienza  and  MS from  University  of Rome  Tor  Vergata, and spent  a  yearin  Australia as  an Endeavour Fellow carrying  out  research toward  his  MS thesis. Marco received  his  Ph.D.  in Materials Science from MIT, where he worked with Prof. Jeff Grossman on novel materials and physical processes for solar energy conversion. He was a postdoc in the Physics Department at UC Berkeley, where, workingwith Profs. Steve Louie and Jeff Neaton, he developed new theoretical approaches for investigating excited electrons in materials. Marco’s group at Caltech develops quantum mechanical calculations aimed at understanding the dynamics  of  electrons  in  materials,  with  applications  to  electronics,  optoelectronics,  energy, quantum technologies and ultrafast science. Marco has given seminal contributions in this field, for which he received the 2015 Psi-K Volker Heine Young Investigator Award, awarded every five years to recognize an individual for outstanding work in electronic structure calculations, as well as the AFOSR Young Investigator Award in 2017 and the NSF CAREER Award in 2018. His  work  favors  quantitative  analysis  and accurate computational approaches  to understand the physics and potential applications of novel materials, charting new directions in materials theory.