Adapted from this Berkeley Lab press release
Kristin Persson – Director of the Foundry until she stepped down in July 2024 – has been named a 2024 Distinguished Scientist Fellow by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
As part of the Office of Science award, Persson will receive $1 million in direct funding via the Distinguished Scientist Fellows program to support her research.
Persson was honored for “pioneering advancements in data-driven materials design and discovery through first-principles based computations and analysis algorithms that yield materials with optimal properties for engineers and scientists worldwide to accelerate innovation, and for her management and outreach skills that promote the DOE missions,” according to the Office of Science award citation.
Persson and the other recipients – Mary Raafat Mikhail Bishai of Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lois Curfman McInnes of Argonne National Laboratory, and Gerald A. Tuskan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory – will each give an online public lecture as part of a virtual awards ceremony in the coming months. Persson’s online lecture will take place Oct. 17 and is open for registration to the public.
Now in its sixth year, this award recognizes prominent scientists doing research relevant to Office of Science programs, and in particular, scientific leadership and engagement with the academic and research communities, significant mentoring of early-career scientists or engineers, the quality of publications in high-impact journals, and service to the research community.
Under Persson’s directorship since 2011, the Materials Project has become the most widely used open-access repository of information on inorganic materials in the world. The database holds millions of properties on hundreds of thousands of crystalline structures and molecules, information primarily processed at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Science Computing Center. More than 500,000 people – many of whom include researchers who are developing new materials for high-performance batteries, fuel cells, photovoltaics, and data storage – are registered as users of the site and, on average, more than four papers citing the Materials Project are published every day.
She served as director of the Molecular Foundry between 2020 and 2024. During her tenure, she successfully steered the Foundry and its user community through the unpredictable challenges of a global pandemic by overseeing new programs enabling greater interactions with researchers who could not easily travel to Berkeley during lockdown, among other notable achievements.
Read the full press release
