Rate My Professor Mariana Rossi

Professor Mariana Rossi is the Unilever Professor of Molecular Sciences Informatics in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, assuming the position in January 2026. Born in Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, she obtained her bachelor's and master's degrees in Physics from the University of São Paulo, receiving a FAPESP fellowship for her master's research on electronic structure theory and charge transport under Professors Antônio José Roque da Silva and Adalberto Fazzio. She earned her Ph.D. at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society (Technical University Berlin), supervised by Professors Volker Blum and Matthias Scheffler, focusing on first-principles electronic structure methods for biomolecule structure determination. Rossi conducted postdoctoral work at the University of Oxford's Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory with Professor David Manolopoulos, studying path integral methods and approximate quantum dynamics, and at EPFL Lausanne with Professor Michele Ceriotti, combining ab initio simulations, path integrals, and machine learning.

Her career includes leading the independent Otto Hahn Group 'Simulations from Ab Initio Approaches' at the Fritz Haber Institute (2016-2019) and heading a tenured Lise Meitner Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg since 2020. Rossi's research centers on first-principles electronic structure theory, path-integral quantum mechanics, and machine learning to achieve quantum-accurate simulations of complex molecular systems at realistic scales, advancing theoretical and computational chemistry. Major awards include the Otto Hahn Award and Minerva Program placement from the Max Planck Society, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft postdoctoral fellowship, Junior Research Fellowship at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Lise-Meitner Excellence Program selection (2019), Nernst-Haber-Bodenstein Prize from the Deutsche Bunsen-Gesellschaft (2024), and an ERC Consolidator Grant (2024). Key publications feature 'Nuclear Quantum Effects in H+ and OH– Diffusion along Confined Water Wires' (The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 2016), 'Progress and challenges in ab initio simulations of non-adiabatic molecular dynamics' (The Journal of Chemical Physics, 2021), and 'First-Principles Simulations of Tip Enhanced Raman Scattering Reveal Active Role of Substrate on High-Resolution Images' (ACS Nano, 2023).