Rate My Professor Marivi Fernandez-Serra

Marivi Fernandez-Serra is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute for Advanced Computational Sciences at Stony Brook University, positions she has held since her promotion in September 2018. She previously served as Associate Professor from 2013 to 2018 and Assistant Professor from 2008 to 2013 at the same institution. Prior to joining Stony Brook, she was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire (CECAM) in Lyon, France, from 2006 to 2007, and at the Laboratoire de Physique de la Matière Condensée et Nanostructures et CNRS, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, from 2005 to 2006. Fernandez-Serra obtained her PhD in Physics from Jesus College, University of Cambridge, in 2005, her Master's in Condensed Matter Physics from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2001, and her BA in Physics from the same university in 1999. Her accolades include election as an APS Fellow in 2021 by the Division of Computational Physics for extending density functional theory to complex materials like water, ice, and interfaces; the DOE Early Career Award in 2010; and a Marie Curie Fellowship from 2006 to 2008. She has also served on the Physics Department's Status of Women committee from 2010 to 2018 and was elected secretary of the Division of Computational Physics of the APS.

Her research in computational condensed matter physics centers on developing and applying ab initio quantum mechanical methods to explore the atomic and electronic structure and dynamics of complex systems, particularly liquid water and its anomalies, electrochemical interfaces, photocatalytic semiconductors, and functional materials. Collaborating with experimentalists, her group simulates non-equilibrium conditions, designs new materials, and addresses challenges like predicting interfacial properties from first principles. Notable contributions include machine learning approaches to improve exchange-correlation functionals in density functional theory and studies on dark matter detection, nanocapacitor behavior, and lightning origins. Key publications encompass "Machine Learning a Highly Accurate Exchange and Correlation Functional of the Electronic Density" (Nature Communications, 2020), "Direct Detection of sub-GeV Dark Matter with Semiconductor Targets" (Journal of High Energy Physics, 2016), "How water’s properties are encoded in its molecular structure and energies" (Chemical Reviews, 2017), "Flexoelectricity and surface ferroelectricity in natural water ice" (under review in Nature Physics, 2023), and "Anti-Coulomb ion-ion interactions: A theoretical and computational study" (Physical Review Research, 2024).