Welcome to COSMO, Andrea, Anne Sofie and Hengtai!

Andrea completed his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Trento, Italy, where he specialized in theoretical condensed matter physics. He then pursued a PhD at the same university under the supervision of Prof. Matteo Calandra, focusing on the development of machine learning interatomic potentials to study photoinduced non-thermal melting and liquid-liquid phase transitions.

Anne Sofie has a strong background in theoretical and computational physics from her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in physics engineering at the Technical University of Denmark. Her previous research includes modeling the optical and electronic response of nanophotonic systems as well as defects and excitons in 2D materials. She is fascinated by the ability to predict material properties and looking forward to accelerating this with ML in the COSMO lab.

At COSMO, Anne Sofie will be working with ML for electronic structure, including understanding the design space of such models and going towards a universal model.

Hengtai completed an integrated Master's in Chemistry (MChem) at Christ Church, Oxford. For his final year — the Part II research year — he worked with Prof. David Manolopoulos FRS, in collaboration with Dr. Zezhu Zeng, on the nuclear quantum effects on the thermal conductivity of solid hydrogen.

For his PhD, he will be working on machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) for metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), using them to calculate vibrational and thermal properties, alongside work on learning the action for molecular dynamics. More broadly, he is interested in using machine learning to develop scalable methods for problems in quantum dynamics.