Michele Parrinello


Michele Parrinello is an Italian physicist particularly known for his work in molecular dynamics. Parrinello and Roberto Car were awarded the Dirac Medal and the Sidney Fernbach Award in 2009 for their continuing development of the Car-Parrinello method, first proposed in their seminal 1985 paper, "Unified Approach for Molecular Dynamics and Density-Functional Theory".

Life and career

Michele Parinello was born in Messina and received his Laurea in physics from the University of Bologna in 1968. After working at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, the IBM research laboratory in Zurich, and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, he was appointed Professor of Computational Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 2001, a position he also holds at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano. In 2004 he was elected to Great Britain's Royal Society. In 2011 he was awarded the Marcel Benoist Prize. In 2020 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry. He currently has an h-index of , which is one of the highest among all scientists.

Selected notable contributions