walter kohn prize
The prize for quantum-mechanical materials and molecular modeling, jointly instituted and co-funded by ICTP and the Quantum ESPRESSO Foundation, is awarded biennially to a young scientist for outstanding contributions in this field, performed in a developing country or emerging economy, with emphasis on first-principles techniques.
The Prize is usually awarded to one person but may be shared equally among recipients who contribute to the same work. The Prize consists of:
- a cash award of €2000
- a citation
- an invitation to attend the award ceremony and deliver an award lecture at ICTP
The winner of the 2024 prize is Professor Rafael Gonzalez Hernandez, from the Universidad del Norte, Colombia, 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.
Gonzalez Hernandez’s work has paved the way for experimental validation of altermagnetism using density functional theory.
The award ceremony will be held in January 2025 at ICTP, Trieste, Italy, during the International Workshop on Computational Physics and Materials Science: Total Energy and Force Methods.
Walter Kohn, 1998 Nobel Laureate for Chemistry, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1923, and became a naturalised US citizen in 1957 after escaping Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and earning university degrees in Canada and the United States in the 1940s. Renowned for his work as a condensed matter theorist, Kohn made seminal contributions to our understanding of the electronic structure of materials. He played a leading role in developing density functional theory, which has proved an invaluable concept for physicists, chemists and materials scientists. Kohn was also founding director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He was a passionate pacifist and an advocate of green technologies. Kohn passed away on 19 April 2016.