Rate My Professor Nicola Marzari

Nicola Marzari is the Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, a position he assumed in September 2025. This historic chair, established in 1871, has been held by distinguished physicists including James Clerk Maxwell, J. J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, and Nevill Mott. A Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Marzari obtained his Laurea in Physics summa cum laude from the University of Trieste in 1992 and his PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge in 1996, advised by Prof. Michael C. Payne. His postdoctoral research was conducted at Rutgers University as an NSF Fellow under Prof. David Vanderbilt. Subsequent appointments included research faculty at George Mason University and the Naval Research Laboratory, research staff at Princeton University, and tenured positions at MIT as AMAX Assistant Professor of Computational Materials Science (2001–2005), Associate Professor (2005–2011), and Toyota Chair of Materials Engineering (2009–2011). He held the inaugural Statutory Chair of Materials Modelling at the University of Oxford (2010–2011), directing the Materials Modelling Laboratory, before joining EPFL as Chair of Theory and Simulation of Materials (2011–2025), Director of the National Centre for Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials (MARVEL) since 2014, and Head of the Laboratory for Materials Simulations at the Paul Scherrer Institut.