Lab COSMO welcomes Dr. Jean-François Olivieri and Lucas Pinède!

Jean-François joined the COSMO laboratory at EPFL as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow. He obtained his PhD in Computational and Theoretical Chemistry from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS)/PSL University in Paris in 2022. Supervised by Damien Laage, his doctoral research focused on molecular dynamics simulations of water and electrolytes at electrified interfaces. He investigated the molecular origin of dielectric constant reduction under confinement and its impact on electron transfer. Following his PhD, he spent four years as a PRAG lecturer at Université Paris-Saclay. He will now work on the ARCADE research project at EPFL, combining machine learning approaches with molecular modelling to accelerate the AI-driven design of electrodes for redox catalysis.

Lucas completed his engineering degree and Master of Science at Chimie ParisTech-PSL and PSL University, developing a strong background at the intersection of computational chemistry and machine learning. His past research includes using equivariant neural networks to model air-water interface reactions at ENS-PSL, and developing generative modeling methods at MIT to accelerate Boltzmann Emulator training and directly sample transition states. Most recently, as an ML and Chemistry Scientist at Entalpic, he built scalable high-throughput screening pipelines for battery materials and modeled experimental semiconductor processes outcomes integrating computational descriptors.