Substantial progress has been made in the last three decades in understanding and predicting the fundamental properties of materials and molecular systems from first principles, employing electronic structure methods and atomistic simulations. Using specific examples, I will discuss some predictions obtained for materials for energy conversion processes (photo-catalysis of water and solar cells) as well as some of the major challenges involved in enabling scientific discoveries by computation; in particular I will touch upon theoretical validation; and collection and verification of data generated by simulations. I will also discuss some of the theoretical and algorithmic advances required to broaden the scope of properties accessible by current ab initio simulations.

Bio: Giulia Galli is the Liew Family Professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations in the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. She also holds a Senior Scientist position at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and she is a Senior Fellow of the UChicago/ANL Computational Institute.