Professor Stefano Baroni awarded the 2026 APS Rahman Prize

We are proud to share that Professor Stefano Baroni, founding director of the Quantum ESPRESSO foundation, has received the 2026 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics for “For seminal contributions to the development of first-principles methods to investigate the electronic and thermal properties of condensed systems, and for the development and dissemination of open-source software for electronic structure calculations that has been widely adopted.”

The Rahman Prize has been awarded every year by the American Physical Society since 1992 to recognise outstanding work and promote the dissemination of information in computational physics.
Stefano Baroni is Professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at SISSA (Trieste, Italy) since 1988 and has been director of the Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire (CECAM) between 1994 and 1998.  His conceptual, algorithmic, and software-based contributions have decisively shaped the field across several decades. His impact spans the invention and rigorous formulation of linear-response methods within density-functional theory (DFT), its extension to the reciprocal space with density-functional perturbation theory (DFPT), and its reformulation of time-dependent density-functional theory (TDDFT) using the language of Lanczos recursion; groundbreaking developments in microscopic theories of transport; and the conception, realisation and sustainment of Quantum ESPRESSO itself.

As noted in the motivation for his 2006 election as Fellow of the APS Computational Physics Division, Stefano Baroni has uniquely bridged the gap between theoretical innovation and practical implementation- ensuring that powerful new formalisms are not only mathematically elegant but also become usable by the broader community. His pedagogical clarity and generosity in training new generations of researchers have also ensured the enduring vitality of his scientific and algorithmic legacy.