An Indian-born American physicist, Aneesur Rahman laid the methodological foundations in the 1950s for what would become “molecular dynamics”, a discipline that uses supercomputing to simulate and study the properties of matter at the atomic level. Since 1993, the main international honor in the field of computational physics, awarded annually by the American Physical Society, has borne his name.
The 2026 edition of this prestigious award goes to Stefano Baroni, professor at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, for his fundamental contributions to the study of the electronic, vibrational, and thermal properties of condensed matter, and for the development and dissemination of open-source software for electronic-structure calculations widely used by the scientific community. This recognition also highlights the high level of expertise and research activities housed within Spoke 7 ‘Materials and Molecular Sciences‘ of the ICSC – Italian Research Center on HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing, of which Stefano Baroni is co-leader.
A professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at SISSA since 1988, Baroni’s career has been marked by the creation of new simulation paradigms, the development of tools that have become shared assets of the entire physics community, and leadership roles in major research institutions.
He served as Director of the Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire (CECAM)—then part of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon—from 1994 to 1998. In 2002, he founded at SISSA the National Center for Numerical Simulation DEMOCRITOS, now part of the Institute of Materials Workshop of the CNR. In 2022, he was appointed co-leader of Spoke 7 of the ICSC National Center, where his experience and expertise have been decisive in bridging research and industry, facilitating the transfer and application of numerical techniques for studying material and molecular properties in production processes. In this context also lies his involvement with Materys, a SISSA startup dedicated to high-performance computing services, of which Baroni is a founding partner.
“Like many recognitions that come later in life, this one is — if not mostly — a tribute to the colleagues and students who made my work possible,” says Baroni. “The motivation for the award recalls three milestones of my career, corresponding to distinct periods: the development in the late 1980s of a now widely used method to calculate the dynamic and dielectric properties of solids; the formulation in the last decade of a new theory of thermal conduction in condensed matter; and, throughout this time, the creation and promotion of the Quantum ESPRESSO software, now considered a standard in quantum material simulations.
These achievements, thanks to the ICSC National Center, can now contribute significantly to the country’s competitiveness and sustainable growth, both academically and industrially.
I therefore regard the work carried out so far within Spoke 7 as very important, and I am sure it will continue in the future to benefit both the research system — helping train and retain new expertise — and the production system, allowing it to take advantage of the extraordinary skills the Italian computational materials science community has accumulated.”
As already noted when he was elected APS Fellow in 2006, Baroni has uniquely bridged the gap between theoretical innovation and practical implementation, creating powerful formalisms and turning them into tools that researchers can concretely use. The Rahman Award further confirms the value of research that combines theoretical elegance, algorithmic application, and the open creation and sharing of high-quality software.
A pioneer of an open-science approach to research, Stefano Baroni has led a community capable of developing cutting-edge codes ready to exploit the most modern computing architectures, placing Italy among the internationally recognized leaders in the field of computational materials science — a role he continues to play within the ICSC National Center.
“I am deeply happy for this recognition, which rewards the vision and commitment of Stefano Baroni, whose work has allowed thousands of researchers around the world to simulate materials and molecules from first principles, develop new theories, and test new methods. His contribution, and the Quantum ESPRESSO community he has promoted and tenaciously supported, testify to the strength of the Italian school of computational materials science. A school that — thanks also to the synergies between SISSA and CNR and to their joint leadership of Spoke 7 of the National Center for HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing — has become an international benchmark,” comments Stefano Fabris, Director of the Department of Physical Sciences of the National Research Council and leader of Spoke 7 of ICSC.
