News archive
[Those with TCM news stories for publication should email news@tcm.phy.]
2023
19th October
27th October
TCM congratulates Gunnar Lange on a
successful PhD viva. Gunnar is now working at
the Max Planck
Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden,
continuing his research on band topology.
TCM congratulates Matthew Evans on a successful PhD viva. Matthew
continues to work as a BEWARE Research Fellow at
UCLouvain
with Prof Gian-Marco
Rignanese, whilst continuing to develop
research data
management software for experimentalists within the group
of Prof Dame Clare
Grey, FRS, in Chemistry.
11th October
TCM congratulates Kamil Iwanowski on
winning the best poster prize at the
Lennard-Jones Centre showcase day.
His poster on "Heat
Transport in Disordered Carbon: Unraveling the Link between Bond Topology
and Thermal Conductivity" described his final-year undergraduate project with
Prof Csányi
and Dr Simoncelli. Kamil has
started a PhD in TCM with Dr Simoncelli
and Prof Payne, and in
collaboration with the experimental group of
Prof Sirringhaus.
1st October

As the new Academic Year commences, TCM welcomes Associate
Professor Anton
Souslov and Asssitant
Professor Christoph
Schran as new members of the Group. Dr Souslov researches
on soft matter, and Dr Schran on computational atomistic
simulation, especially of water.
We also welcome eight new PhD students and postdocs. We wish our
joiners a pleasant and productive time in the Group, and wish
those who recently left every success.
1st September
Innovate UK has awarded a £1.6m two-year grant to
Intellegens and
CPI to "develop a novel machine
learning-driven tool to advance oligonucleotide-therapeutic
characterisation and manufacturing."
This project will
use Alchemite™,
developed in TCM by Dr Gareth
Conduit, to improve the productivity of manufacturing
oligonucleotides. Oligonucleotides are a next-generation therapeutic,
and have the potential to treat many diseases, but their synthesis is
challenging.
21st July
TCM supports the British
Physics Olympiad, and congratulates the British participants
on their return from
the 2023 International Physics
Olympiad in Tokyo with three silver and two bronze
medals. Dr Anson Cheung
accompanied the team to Japan,
Drs Gareth Conduit
and John Biggins contributed to
their training, and the BPhO
website has been refreshed
by Dr Michael Rutter.
Three of the above TCM members themselves won medals at the
International Physics Olympiad when they were
school-leavers.
4th July
TCM congratulates
Dr Clara
Wanjura on receiving
the 2023 Sam
Edwards Thesis Prize from the IoP's Theory of Condensed Matter
Group for her work
on Non-Hermitian Topology
and Directional Amplification in Driven-Dissipative Cavity
Arrays. The prize is for the thesis which "contributes most
strongly to the advancement of theoretical condensed matter physics"
and is open to all at institutions in the UK and Ireland. Clara is now
working as a postdoc at the Max Planck
Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen.
24th June

TCM congratulates Drs Bartomeu
Monserrat and John Biggins on on
their recent successes in the University's annual academic promotions
excercise. From 1st October 2023, they will both be Professors, a
fitting recognition of their research and teaching excellence.
12th May
TCM congratulates Jonathan Nilsson
Hallén on a successful viva. Jonathan will be spending
the summer at the Max Planck Institute for
the Physics
of Complex Systems in Dresden where he will continue his
research projects.
21st April
TCM congratulates Patrick Taylor on
a successful viva. Patrick will move to become a postdoc in the
Mechanical Engineering department at Imperial College where he will
work
with Dr Paul
Hopper on using machine learning to detect defect formation
during 3D printing of metals.
1st March
TCM congratulates Elis
Roberts on a successful viva. Elis now moves to
InstaDeep where
he will be working as a machine learning research engineer
in its biology team.
23rd February
TCM congratulates Dr Antonio
Štrkalj on being elected to a Marie Skłodowska
Curie postdoctoral fellowship. In the autumn he will leave TCM for
the Department of Physics,
University of Zagreb, Croatia, where he will take up this
two-year Fellowship, continuing his work on two-dimensional
many-body localisation.
2022
16th December

Recent work by TCM PhD student Jonathan
Nilsson Hallén, along with his
supervisor Prof Claudio Castelnovo
and collaborators in Germany, America and Argentina, has led to the
discovery
of a fractal pattern in a perfect
crystal. Not only had a fractal not been observed in an undisordered
crystal before, but this result explains puzzling experimental data
stretching back for over a decade. This work has been published in the
journal Science.
2nd December

TCM congratulates Siyu Chen on
being awarded the annual Cavendish prize for the best paper in
Computational Physics from a PhD student for his
paper nonuniform
grids for Brillouin zone integration and interpolation. We also
congratulate Jonathan Nilsson
Hallén on winning the annual Cavendish prize in Theoretical
Physics. Both prizes were presented at
the Graduate
Student Conference on 1st December.
9th November

TCM belatedly congratulates both Ivona Bravic and Clara Wanjura on
their successful PhD vivas. Ivona is now working in Berlin as a
Sustainability Consultant in the renewable energy sector. Clara now
works as a postdoc
in Florian
Marquardt's Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of
Light, Erlangen.
1st October
As the new Academic Year commences, TCM welcomes three new Postdocs
and Fellows, and eight new Graduate Students. TCM wishes its new
members a pleasant and productive time in the Group, and wishes those
leaving every success.
We particularly congratulate Dr Katarzyna Macieszczak as she
moves to be an Assistant Professor in
the Theoretical
Physics Group at Warwick.
22nd September
TCM congratulates Dr Bartomeu
Monserrat on being awarded
the Young
Investigator in Theoretical Physics prize by the Spanish Royal
Physics Society for "his outstanding contribution to the theoretical
physics of materials, developing new methods to calculate finite
temperature and high pressure properties," which will "allow a better
understanding of compounds of high technological relevance with
implications in organic semiconductors, topological materials and
photovoltaic cells."
30th August

TCM congratulates Angela Harper
and Tobias Schaich on their
successful PhD vivas. Angela is moving to the Fritz Haber
Institute in Berlin to start a postdoc under a Max Planck
Fellowship, and Tobias hopes to continue his research on novel
communications technologies.
27th June
TCM congratulates Dr Pieter
Claeys on his recent move to the Max Planck Institute for the
Physics of Complex Systems where he now heads his own Research Group
on the
Dynamics of Quantum Information.
20th June
TCM congratulates Dr Daniel
Bennett on receiving
the 2022
Sam Edwards Thesis Prize from the IoP's Theory of Condensed
Matter Group. The prize is for the thesis which "contributes most
strongly to the advancement of theoretical condensed matter
physics," is open to all at institutions in the UK and Ireland, and
includes a bottle of wine from Sir Sam's cellar, now owned by
Caius College. Danny is now
working as a postdoc at
the University of
Liège.
15th June
TCM congratulates Benjamin Remez on a
successful PhD viva. Benji now leaves TCM to take up a
Yale Prize Fellowship in Yale's
Condensed Matter Theory
Group.
5th May
TCM congratulates Andrea Pizzi on a
successful PhD viva. Andrea is taking up a postdoc position at Harvard
before returning as a Trinity
College Junior Research Fellow.
3rd May
TCM congratulates its alumni Drs
David O'Regan
and
Paul Eastham
on being elected as
Fellows
of Trinity College Dublin last month.
8th April
TCM is delighted to have received a
£3.67m grant from
EPSRC. This
four-year grant, which includes collaborators
from Materials
Science, DAMTP and
the Sanger
Institute, provides flexible, long-term funding allowing TCM to
continue to undertake the innovative, high risk, high reward research
that, historically, has had significant impact.
21st March
TCM congratulates Nora Martin on her
successful PhD viva. Nora is now continuing her research in
Biological Physics as a
postdoc
in Oxford.
2nd March
TCM congratulates Rhys Goodall on
successfully completing his PhD. Rhys is currently working at a
start-up in California.
11th February
TCM congratulates Bo Peng on being
awarded a Magdalene
College Junior Research Fellowship. He will remain in TCM
working on applications of Density Functional Theory.
11th February
TCM congratulates Nick
Woods on successfully completing his PhD. His thesis has joined
the many others downloadable from our
thesis page.
24th January
TCM congratulates Andrea Pizzi on
being awarded a Trinity
College Junior Research Fellowship to further his research
on nonequilibrium many-body systems. Before starting at Trinity,
Andrea will move to Harvard as a postdoc in
Prof Norman
Yao's group.
11th January
TCM congratulates Dr Robert-Jan
Slager on being awarded
an European
Research Council Starting Grant of over £1m to continue
his work on multi-gap topological physics. His work applies
elegant mathematical principles to real materials, predicting
observable phenomena, and is particularly relevant to the fields
of electronics and quantum computing.
4th January
With great sadness we report the death of
Prof Mark Warner, FRS, following a
short illness. Mark had a distinguished career in soft condensed
matter, particularly liquid crystals. He was also devoted to
widening access to Physics and Mathematics at school level, being
instrumental in setting up
the Senior Physics
Challenge followed by Isaac
Physics. Following his recent retirement, he
retained a post that allowed him to continue his research and outreach.
2021
7th December
TCM congratulates Jessica Halliday on
her successful PhD viva. Jessica is now working for Bain & Company in London.
30th November
TCM congratulates Dr Bartomeu
Monserrat on being awarded
the 2021
James Clerk Maxwell Medal and Prize by
the Institute of Physics. The
citation highlights his "exceptional contributions to the development of
computational techniques that bring temperature to modern electronic
structure methods, and their application to topological materials,
photovoltaics, superconductors and planetary physics."
29th November

TCM congratulates Bo Peng on being
awarded the annual Cavendish prize for the best paper in Computational
Physics from a PhD student. It was awarded for Topological phonons
in oxide perovskites controlled by light, published
in Science
Advances. We also congratulate Gunnar
Lange who won a runner-up prize for the best talk at
the Cavendish Graduate
Student Conference.
19th November
TCM congratulates Daniel Bennett on
a successful PhD viva. Danny is now working as a postdoc with Prof
Philippe Ghosez at
the University of
Liège.
19th November


TCM congratulates three PhD students,
Gunnar
Lange, Patrick Taylor and
Jack Whaley-Baldwin, on their recent
attendance of an
Nvidia CUDA/python
workshop.
8th October

As the new Academic Year commences, TCM wishes its new members a
pleasant and productive time in the Group, and wishes those
leaving every success.
We also congratulate Dr Nur Ünal on being elected as a
Senior Postdoctoral Researcher
at Trinity College, and
Prof Claudio Castelnovo on being
elected
a Fellow
of the Max Planck Society at the Max Plank Graduate Centre for
Quantum Materials. Both remain in TCM.
20th September
TCM congratulates Michael Hutcheon
on a successful PhD viva. Michael has moved to Nottingham to start a
postdoc in the Quantum Electronic
Structure Techniques group of Dr Andrew Teale.
13th September
TCM congratulates Dr Bingqing
Cheng on being awarded the Volker Heine Young Investigator Award by Psi-k.
4th August
TCM congratulates Dr Bingqing
Cheng as she starts to set up her own research group in the
IST, Austria, where she will
continue to develop methods to extend the scope of atomistic
simulations. She takes up her new post of Assistant Professor at the start of
September.
24th June
TCM congratulates Dr Jan
Behrends on being awarded
a Leverhulme
Early Career Fellowship which he will take up in January.
He will remain in TCM continuing his research on topology and
many-body chaos.
10th June
TCM congratulates Max McGinley on being
awarded the Institute of Physics' Theory of Condensed Matter Group's
Sam
Edwards Thesis Prize for his thesis
Dynamical
Aspects of Topological Quantum Systems. Max is currently a
postdoc at Oxford, but is expected to return to TCM and his Junior
Research Fellowship at Trinity College.
10th June
TCM congratulates Can Koçer on his
successful PhD viva. Can is now working as
a Data Science Fellow
at the AI company faculty.
17th May
TCM congratulates Alice Shipley on her
successful PhD viva. She will soon start work with Goldman Sachs as
a Quantitative Engineer.
6th May
TCM congratulates Prof Ben
Simons on his election as a Fellow of the Royal
Society. Prof Simons has a distinguished research record in a
broad range of fields from quantum condensed matter physics to
developmental biology, particularly the regulation of stem cells. His
experimental work is based at
the Gurdon Institute, and
he was TCM's Head of Group for several years before moving
to DAMTP.
9th April
Prof Volker Heine's book on
Group
Theory now has a Hindi translation, thanks to the work of
Prof KS Sharma
at IIS. Prof Heine has
donated his share of the royalties to fund an annual medal
for the top MSc student in Physics there, and the first medal has
just been awarded.
19th March
TCM is very sorry to learn of the death, on 15th March, of
Prof. Neil Ashcroft. Neil came to Cambridge from New Zealand to
undertake
a PhD
under Prof Volker Heine. He
graduated in 1964, and remained a regular visitor to TCM after
moving to America where he enjoyed a distinguished career. He
co-authored the seminal text-book
Solid
State Physics with David Mermin, and his foundational
works on superconductivity in atomic hydrogen underpin the recent
advances in room temperature superconductivity in metallic hydrides.
16th March

TCM congratulates Dr Pieter
Claeys and Prof Austen
Lamacraft on their paper entitled Ergodic and Nonergodic Dual-Unitary Quantum Circuits with
Arbitrary Local Hilbert Space Dimension being selected for the
front cover
of Physical Review Letters, as well as being an Editors' Suggestion.
One can also read their
summary of this work.
9th March

TCM congratulates Attila Szabó
and Philipp Verpoort on their
successful PhD vivas. Attila has already moved to a Junior Research
Fellowship at Wadham
College, Oxford, and Philipp has since secured a job at the
Potsdam Institute for
Climate Impact Research.
25th February
TCM congratulates Mark Johnson on
a successful PhD viva. Mark will remain in TCM for the immediate future.
22nd February
3D printing is the latest area to benefit from the machine learning
capabilities of Alchemite, the versatile deep learning platform developed by
Dr Gareth Conduit and
commercialised
by Intellegens. A
collaboration
between Ansys and
Intellegens will help to optimise many aspects of the 3D printing
process.
26th January
Physics World, the magazine of
the Institute of Physics, has named
the Josephson
Effect as one of the
ten
greatest predictions in Physics.
18th January
Intellegens has announced a
collaboration with
the University
of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and Boeing to
use Intellegens' machine learning algorithms to develop new metal
alloys for aerospace applications as part of
the National Aerospace Technology
Exploitation Programme. The algorithms used were developed in TCM
by
Dr Gareth Conduit, CTO of Intellegens.
6th January
TCM belatedly congratulates James Darby on
a successful PhD viva last Term. James is now working as a postdoc for
Prof Gábor
Csányi of the Engineering Department, and will doubtless stay
in close contact with TCM.
2020
26th November
TCM congratulates Clara Wanjura on
being awarded the Cavendish's annual
postgraduate
theory prize for her paper entitled
Topological
framework for directional amplification in driven-dissipative cavity
arrays published in Nature Communications. She will present this
work at the Cavendish's Postgraduate Student Conference.
16th November
TCM congratulates Darryl Foo on
his successful PhD viva. Darryl now has a research fellowship working with
Prof Shaffique
Adam in the Centre for
Advanced 2D Materials in the National University of
Singapore.
4th November
TCM congratulates Dr Johannes
Hofmann on his appointment as a Senior Lecturer in the Physics
Department of the
University of Gothenburg.
4th November
TCM congratulates Alex Wade on
his successful PhD viva. Alex is now a postdoc working with
Prof Peter Coveney in UCL.
31st October
Dr Gareth Conduit and TCM
alumnus Dr Tom Whitehead of
Intellegens, along with
TCM alumni Drs Matt Segall and Ben Irwin
of Optibrium, have launched
Cerella,
an artifical intelligence software platform for drug discovery.
Cerella uses deep learning methods from Alchemite, which is developed
by Dr Conduit.
23rd October
TCM congratulates Dr Bingqing Cheng on being awarded a
Departmental Early Career Academic Fellowship by
the Department of Computer
Science. Dr Cheng will remain affiliated to TCM as she
starts this Fellowship and continues her research in machine
learning as applied to properties of materials.
We also congratulate Dr Jan
Behrends on being elected to a Fellowship
at Darwin College.
1st October
TCM congratulates Dr Alpha
Lee on the award of a prestigious
Royal
Society University Research Fellowship to support his
research activities on the design of new materials and drugs. He uses
physical insights and statistical methods to develop models that can learn
from large data sets.
18th September
TCM congratulates Prof Volker
Heine FRS on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Volker arrived
in the Cavendish from New Zealand in 1954 to study for a PhD under
Sir Nevill Mott, and soon joined the new Solid State Theory group,
later renamed TCM. He was its Head from 1975 until 1997, and one of
the founders of the Psi-k network. He
has made many contributions to theoretical and computational electronic
structure research, and remains active in TCM.
15th September
TCM congratulates Max McGinley on
his successful PhD viva. Max is moving to a postdoc position at Oxford
University's Physics
Department.
14th September
TCM congratulates Nicolò
Forcellini on his successful PhD viva. Nicolò is now moving to a
postdoc position at the BAQIS
(Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences)
and Tsinghua
University.
3rd September
TCM congratulates Petr Zapletal on
his successful PhD viva. Petr is now moving to a postdoc position at
the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
27th August
TCM congratulates Dr Gareth
Conduit on being offered a three year extension to his Royal
Society University Research Fellowship. He will remain in TCM
continuing his research applying machine learning to designing new
materials and drugs.
7th August
TCM
congratulates Attila Szabó on
being elected to the Keeley-Rutherford Junior Research Fellowship at
Wadham College where he
will work with groups from both
the Rudolf Peierls
Centre and ISIS.
27th July
Dr Jerelle Joseph has
shared her experience of doing a PhD at Cambridge in
an interview
with DiscoverPhDs.
27th July
TCM
congratulates Stephen Spurrier on
successfully defending his PhD thesis. Stephen now works on machine
learning for Tesco in London.
24th July

TCM congratulates Dr Rosana
Collepardo on her joint lectureship in Chemistry and
Genetics. She describes her research and her career in this
short video.
Similarly we congratulate Dr Andreas
Nunnenkamp on his proleptic Assistant Professorship at the University
of Nottingham. We are pleased that both will remain affiliated with
TCM as they look after their teams and projects based here.
6th July
TCM gets a new look to its home page. The old style, with its
three tabs, is recorded above, and can
still be seen.
2nd July
TCM congratulates Yu Yang Liu on his successful PhD viva.
Yang is moving on to a postdoc in MIT before returning to A*STAR in Singapore
2nd July
Liverpool F.C. wins the Premier League,
aided by the data analysis team led by
Dr Ian Graham,
former member of TCM.
1st July
TCM congratulates Dr Sebastian Ahnert as he starts a
lectureship in the Department
of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. His new Department is not
far from TCM, and we expect him to maintain his links with TCM.
24th June

Dr Bartomeu Monserrat has
launched
a YouTube
channel dedicated to explaining Quantum Mechanics,
and Dr Michael Rutter has
launched a small website of
some Maths and Physics
experiments one can do on
a Raspberry Pi.
15th June
TCM congratulates Dr Bartomeu Monserrat
on being named by JPhys Materials as an
Emerging
Leader 2020 for his development of first principles quantum
mechanical methods to study material properties at non-zero
temperatures.
8th June

The fourth OPTIMADE workshop to
develop a common API to access materials databases is running this week,
hosted by CECAM
(virtually) at Lausanne. The workshop is co-organized by Dr Conduit, with Matthew Evans helping to lead the development of an
open
source python library.
4th June
TCM congratulates Ezequiel Rodriguez Chiacchio on successfully
defending his PhD thesis in his viva.
29th May



A team of TCM PhD students, Yu Yang Liu,
Lupeng Yang and
Siyu Chen, won prizes in the
Future
of Blockchain competition. They applied the blockchain to
train multiple machine learning models collaboratively while keeping
data private. Their
platform, DeepVerse, was initiated
and is developed by Yu Yang Liu.
18th May
TCM congratulates Dr Nur
Ünal as she starts her
Royal
Society Newton International Fellowship whilst remaining in
TCM. She will be working on topology in ultracold quantum gases far
from equilibrium.
1st May
TCM congratulates Dr Sarah Teichmann
on her election as a
Fellow
of the Royal Society. Her research, on protein complexes, and
on gene regulation in the immune system, bridges computational and
experimental molecular biology. It has produced insights into
cancer, and into respiratory and auto-immune diseases. She is also
the co-founder and co-leader of
the Human Cell Atlas
consortium.
30th April


The entry to the Open Source Malaria prize by TCM members
Dr Gareth Conduit
& Alex Wade and TCM alumni
Dr Ben Irwin, Dr Tom Whitehead &
Dr Matthew Segall has been
experimentally
verified as the most potent compound submitted. It was discovered using the
machine learning
algorithm Alchemite™
invented and developed by Dr Conduit.
1st April
The TCM Group is very sorry to learn of the death, on 29th March,
of
Prof. Philip
W. Anderson, one of the most influential condensed
matter theorists. Phil was Head of TCM
from 1967 to 1975, and delighted to point out that, in naming the
Group, he coined the term "condensed matter physics." In
1977 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with John
Van Vleck and Sir Nevill Mott) for "fundamental
theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic
and disordered systems."
Obituaries:
Physics World,
New York Times.
4th March
TCM replaces its failing coffee machine with a new model, one which
contains much more electronics than the previous ones.
14th February
TCM congratulates Max McGinley on
being elected to a Junior Research Fellowship
at Trinity College to
further his research on the behaviour of complex quantum systems.
24th January
Congratulations to Will Grant on passing his PhD viva. Will is moving to California to pursue his career.
12th January
Scientists from all around the world gathered to
celebrate Mike Payne's 60th Birthday on
11 January 2020. The Old Library at Pembroke College provided a
splendid backdrop for the event, at which the audience heard about
Mike's lofty scientific achievements, in particular the development
and commercialization of the
venerable CASTEP
and ONETEP codes, and colleagues
former and present reminisce about their time with Mike in
Cambridge. The day was finished off with a fine Dinner in
Pembroke.
7th January
Angela Harper, one of TCM's PhD
students, has been interviewed for the
University's Research
News pages, where she discusses her computational research in
lithium-ion battery materials and her work with Women in STEM
programmes.
2019
12th December


A neural network developed jointly by
Intellegens and
Optibrium is one of the
winners of
the Open
Source Malaria prize for predicting new anti-malarial compounds.
Their model was based on Alchemite, an algorithm developed
by Dr Gareth Conduit, and TCM
alumni Drs
Whitehead and Irwin worked to apply it to
this particular task.
6th December
Congratulations to Andrea Pizzi on
winning the Abdus Salam theory prize at
the 2019 Cavendish Graduate
Student Conference.
21st November
TCM congratulates Dr Bartomeu
Monserrat on being appointed to a lectureship in the
Department of Materials
Science. The Department is only a few hundred yards away, and we
hope to continue to work closely with Dr Monserrat after he takes
up his new post in January.
12th November
The November issue of Physics World
includes an
interview
with Dr Gareth
Conduit describing how he formed a startup company,
Intellegens, to
commercialize novel neural network techniques whose
applications span alloy design for jet engines, 3D
printing, and drug design.
29th October
TCM congratulates Beñat Mencia on
passing his PhD viva. Beñat is now working on machine learning for
Bosch in California.
3rd October

As the new Academic Year commences, TCM congratulates
Prof Austen Lamacraft on
promotion to being a professor,
and Dr Jorge R Espinosa
on gaining a Fellowship at Emmanuel College.
The Group also welcomes six new postdocs and visitors, and twelve
new graduate students. We wish all a pleasant a productive time in the
Group.
12th September
TCM congratulates Kevin Duff on passing his PhD viva. Kevin now
works for Enthought in its
Cambridge offices.
2nd September
TCM congratulates Edward Linscott on passing his PhD viva. Edward will be
moving to the group of TCM alumnus Nicola Marzari at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.
26th July
We are delighted that TCM alumna, Dr Alix Pryde, has been elected to the Institute of Physics Council. She takes on this role on top of her other responsibilites as Director of Service Strategy and Operational Delivery at Sky UK and a Non-Executive Director at the King's College Hospital NHS Trust.
2nd July
We are delighted that, in this year's
IoP Awards, Prof Mark Warner was
awarded the
Bragg
Medal, jointly with Dr Lisa Jardine-Wright, for setting up
and directing the
Isaac Physics programme which "has
revolutionised physics education for teachers and students in an
extraordinary number of UK schools."
Prof Nigel Cooper received the Lord Rayleigh medal
"for profound contributions to the quantum theory of many-particle
systems, concerning both topological phases of cold atoms in artificial
gauge fields and novel phenomena in electronic materials."
6th June
The first TCM research formal of the 2018-19 academic year took place on Thursday 6 June at St John's College. A fun night was had by all, hopefully the first of many!
22nd May
A pioneering application of machine learning by Gareth Conduit has been experimentally proven to predict accurately the properties of metal-organic frameworks. This class of materials has many promising applications including the extraction water from the air in the desert and the storage of dangerous gases including in hydrogen-based cars.
16th May
Danny Bennett has appeared on
National Television speaking about
his voluntary work to encourage people to sign up to be stem cell donors.
30th April
TCM congratulates Chris Parmee on
successfully defending his PhD thesis. We wish him well for the future.
8th April
Image ©Nobel Media AB / Pi Frisk
It is with great sadness that we report the death of former
colleague,
Prof David
Thouless. Prof Thouless held posts in TCM in the 1960s
and 1980s, and was a frequent Summer visitor thereafter whilst
working at the University of Washington, Seattle. His illustrious career
contributing to the theory of phases of matter culminated in the
award of the
2016
Nobel Prize in Physics, which he is shown above left receiving from
King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.
22nd March
We welcome
Dr Bingqing Cheng
who has just joined the Group as a Junior Research Fellow of Trinity
College. She has recently completed her PhD at
EPFL, working on
statistical mechanics and atomistic modelling.
22nd February
Congratulations to Nontawit Cheewaruangroj for passing his PhD viva today. Nontawit is going on to work on public policy in science and technology for the Thai government.
17th January
Three TCM researchers, Yu Yang Liu, Bart Andrews, and Gareth Conduit, had their paper
"Direct evaluation of the force constant matrix in quantum Monte Carlo"
selected as Editors' Pick in the
Journal of Chemical Physics 150, 034104 (2019).
Well done!
3rd January
TCM congratulates Bart Andrews on passing
his PhD viva. Bart is currently working as a postdoc in the University of Zurich.
2018
13th December
TCM congratulates Ben Irwin on passing
his PhD viva. Ben leaves us to work with a local company applying machine
learning to drug design.
3rd December
TCM congratulates Alice Allen on passing
her PhD viva. Alice remains in Cambridge, taking up a postdoc position
with Prof Gábor Csányi in the Engineering Department.
29th November
Prof Mark Warner has just published
Pre-University Mathematics for Sciences, the latest in a
series of Sixth Form level text books aimed particularly at the
Physical Sciences and available at
isaacbooks.org. The series
is sold at cost price, £1 per book, and over 120,000 copies have been
sold.
15th November
TCM congratulates
Dr Katarzyna Macieszczak on taking up
the Henslow Research Fellowship at Selwyn
College. She will remain in TCM as she continues her research on
non-equilibrium quantum systems.
10th October
Dr Gareth Conduit has won a
£1M InnovateUK award alongside Optibrium and the Medicines Discovery Catapult to
use deep learning to improve the efficiency and productivity of drug discovery.
1st October
We congratulate
Prof Ben Simons on the award
of a Royal Society
EP Abraham
Research Professorship. He moves to
DAMTP, and he will also establish an
experimental lab. Ben has been central to activities in TCM and the
Cavendish for many years, through his outstanding record of
research across disciplines, and through his leadership, notably as
Head of the TCM Group. We wish him every success in his new activities, and
are pleased that he has chosen to remain co-affiliated with TCM.
30th September
As the new academic year starts TCM welcomes over a dozen new PhD
students and two new postdocs, Drs Jan Behrends and Shovan Dutta.
We wish all our new members a pleasant and productive time in the Group.
With the close of the 2017-18 academic year we express our best wishes to those who recently left TCM, moving to a variety of fulfilling positions in the UK and beyond.
11th September
Dr Gareth Conduit and startup Intellegens have licensed their deep learning code Alchemite™ to Optibrium for resale to clients in drug discovery. Optibrium CEO, Dr Matt Segall, who completed his PhD in TCM, comments "their deep learning technology, already proven in the field of materials design, has shown remarkable results when applied to challenging drug discovery".
10th September
Congratulations to
Daniel Malz for passing his PhD viva. Daniel
will shortly leave us to take up a postdoc postition at the
Max Planck Institute for Quantum
Optics at Munich.
9th September
Daniel Rowlands passed his PhD viva and
will take up a position in the Catholic Church.
8th September
We congratulate Dr Johannes Hofmann
as he moves from a Research Fellowship at Caius to be a College Teaching
Officer at Peterhouse, and from TCM to
DAMTP.
20th August
Congratulations to
Ed Tait for passing his PhD viva. Ed is
now working for a local software company.
21st July
Congratulations to
Graham Spink on graduating his PhD. We wish Graham well for his lectureship at the University of Chester.
19th July
Congratulations to Adam
Smith on a successful PhD viva. We wish Adam well for the future:
in September he leaves us for a postdoc position in Germany.
22nd June
Congratulations to Max McGinley on
winning the Nature Reviews Physics prize for the best poster at the
ICTP Conference on
Quantum Dynamics of Disordered Interacting Systems in Trieste.
8th June
Congratulations to Bruno
Loureiro on a successful PhD viva. We wish Bruno well for the future.
23rd May
Congratulations to Dr Bartomeu
Monserrat on receiving a five-year
Winton
Fellowship for research on ab initio computer modelling of materials at room
temperature, with applications including solar
cells. Dr Monserrat will remain a member of TCM, and is TCM's
fifth Winton Fellow.
26th March
TCM congratulates Gabriel
Constantinescu on a successful PhD viva. Gabriel now leaves us for the
world of finance.
13th March
TCM is delighted that Bartomeu Monserrat won
the Volker Heine Young Investigator award, presented at the
German Physical Society's Spring Meeting.
14th February
TCM congratulates Angela Harper on
receiving the American Physical Society's
LeRoy Apker Award
"for significant contributions to printed electronics research and
outstanding leadership of the Society of Physics Students and Society of
Women in STEM fields."
2nd February
TCM congratulates Joe Prentice
on successfully defending his PhD thesis. Joe is now a postdoc at
Imperial College.
23rd January
TCM congratulates Tom Whitehead on successfully defending his PhD thesis "Interacting Fermi Gases". Well done!
2017
13th December
Cambridge Enterprise has provided funding
for Intellegens, a
spin-out company, co-founded by Gareth
Conduit, which has developed proprietary algorithms to allow
neural networks to be trained on incomplete data. The technique has
already been applied to materials design and drug discovery, but is
much more generally applicable.
8th December
Our congratulations to Dr Alex
Chin who is moving to a permanent academic post at the
CNRS, Paris, in the New Year.
8th December
Our congratulations to Dr Paulo
Medeiros who is moving to a permanent post at the
Swedish Meteorological and
Hydrological Institute in the New Year.
3rd November
We congratulate Dr Michael Rutter on being asked to serve another
one-year term as President of the Cambridge
Branch of the UCU.
1st November
We welcome Dr Karolina Milowska who has just joined the Group
as a postdoc working with Prof Mike Payne using linear scaling
DFT. She previously worked in the Materials Science Department.
1st October
The new academic year sees TCM welcoming many new members.
We extend a particular welcome to Dr Benjamin Béri, who
joins us from Birmingham University to take up a joint lectureship
between Physics and
DAMTP.
We also welcome Drs Matteo Brunelli and Tom Hiscock as
postdocs, Profs David Bowler and Claudio Chamon as sabbatical visitors,
and over a dozen new PhD students.
We wish all our new members a pleasant and productive time in the
Group.
26th September
We are pleased to report that Edouard Hannezo
will take up a faculty position at the
Institute of Science and Technology near Vienna.
26th September
Philip Greulich has
moved to a lectureship in the Mathematics Department of the University of Southampton.
26th September
Steffen Rulands has moved to start his
own Research Group in the Max-Planck
Institute for Complex System, Dresden.
14th September
TCM congratulates Nicholas Worth for passing his PhD viva. Nicholas is currently working for
MathWorks.
11th September
TCM congratuates Gareth Conduit for winning the
Society of Chemical Industry presentation award.
8th September
We are pleased that Andrew Morris has
been appointed to a Lectureship
at Birmingham University
from October. He will remain in
close contact with his many collaborators in TCM, and we expect
him to be a frequent visitor.
6th September
We congratulate Sarah Morgan on being
awarded a Springer Thesis prize for her
PhD
thesis. Sarah is now a Research Associate in
Cambridge Neuroscience.
22nd August
We are pleased that John Biggins has
been appointed to a Lectureship in the Mechanics, Materials and Design
Division of the Engineering
Department, a position which he will take up in September. We are sure that John will retain strong links with TCM as he joins a Division already containing a TCM member, Prof Gábor Csányi.
1st August
We are pleased to report that Nigel Cooper has been selected as a
2017
Simons Investigator in Physics. The program provides "support for
outstanding scientists in their most productive years, when they are
establishing creative new research directions, providing leadership to the
field and effectively mentoring junior scientists." Quoting from the
citation, "Nigel has shown how to design optical lattices for cold atoms
that provide controllable laboratories for exploring the physics of
interacting particles in the presence of gauge fields. He is also known for
foundational works on the topological Kondo effect and on quantum
oscillations in topological insulators."
13th June
Dr Knolle's work as part of an international team including
experimentalists from
Oak Ridge National Lab
has led to the
observation
of magnetic Majorana fermion quasiparticles. Neutron scattering
experiments at very low temperatures in ruthenium trichloride
showed close agreement to the theoretical quantum spin liquid predictions.
The image shows a neutron (blue line) scattering from RuCl3
producing a Majorana fermion (green wave) which disrupts the electron
spins. Image credit Jill Hemman / ORNL press release.
31st May
TCM congratulates Joseph Nelson on passing his PhD viva. Joseph remains
with us as a postdoc in Andrew Morris's group.
29th May
Drs Andrew Morris and Paulo Medeiros, with PhD student Jamie Wynn,
have simulated the
world's thinnest metallic nanowire,
a 1D chain of tellurium inside a carbon nanotube. The computational
simulations revealed a number of different configurations
which the Te atoms take up within the nanotube as the tube's diameter
varies in the range 0.7nm to 1.1nm, with only the thinnest tubes giving
a linear chain rather than a helical twisted chain. Collaborators in the
University of Warwick
have shown that their predictions match the structures found experimentally.
18th May
TCM congratulates James Hamp on passing his PhD viva.
16th May
TCM congratulates Johannes Knolle on gaining a lectureship at
Imperial College. He
will take up this post at the start of the new academic year, and we are
pleased that he intends to continue to collaborate closely with TCM.
15th May
TCM congratulates Yang Liu on winning a poster prize at the CCP9 Young Researchers event.
3rd May
TCM congratulates Salvatore Tesoro on passing his PhD viva.
15th March
TCM congratulates Lars Schonenberg on passing his PhD viva.
2016
10th December
Image ©Nobel Media AB / Pi Frisk
TCM alumni Prof David Thouless (pictured) and Prof Duncan Haldane receive
the Physics Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.
7th December
TCM celebrates its annual Christmas party, complete with traditional pantomime written, starred, and directed by the new 1st-year PhD students. Many thanks to all the new students, especially Mark Johnson for writing the pantomime and Ezequiel Rodriguez Chiacchio for leading the organisation. Merry Christmas to all!
4th November
We are delighted that Dr Rutter has been re-elected to President of
the UCU Cambridge branch.
26th October
TCM congratulates Aurelio Romero-Bermudez on passing his PhD viva.
6th October
TCM congratulates Sarah Morgan on passing her PhD viva.
4th October
TCM is proud and delighted to announce that two of its alumni shared in the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics. Prof. David J. Thouless moved from the Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Department in Cambridge to take up a lectureship in the Solid State Theory group (the early incarnation of TCM) from 1964-65 before moving to the University of Birmingham, where he remained on the faculty for many years. In 1980, David returned to TCM as a Royal Society Research Professor, moving soon after to the University of Washington, Seattle. Fortunately, he remained a frequent Summer visitor to the group. Prof. F. Duncan M. Haldane was a graduate student in TCM working under the supervision of another Nobel Laureate from the group, Prof. Philip Anderson, and receiving his PhD in 1978 before transferring to a post-doctoral position at the Institut Laue-Langevin. . Together with Cavendish graduate Prof. J. Michael Kosterlitz, they received the Nobel Prize "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter". Further information can be found at the Nobel website.
1st October
TCM starts the academic year by welcoming eleven new PhD students to its ranks.
We are also delighted that Prof Emilio
Artacho is now full-time with TCM.
The previous academic year saw our members gain lectureships elsewhere,
as well as many other achievements. At this time we
particularly congratulate Prof Gábor Csányi,
a postdoc in TCM from 2001 to 2007, on becoming a Professor
in Cambridge's Engineering Department.
29th August
We congratulate
Thomas Bilitewski
on passing his PhD viva. Thomas has a position in a Max Plank Institute.
18th August
We congratulate Connie Hsueh on passing her MPhil viva. Connie is now a
PhD student at Stanford University.
17th August
We congratulate
Tom Price
on passing his PhD viva. Tom recently started a postdoc position at
Utrecht University.
13th July
We congratulate
Edgar Engel
on passing his PhD viva. Edgar will remain in TCM as a
Trinity College Junior
Research Fellow.
July
We congratulate
Philip Greulich
on his appointment to a Lectureship in Applied Mathematics
at the
University of Southampton.
15th April
Prof Sir David MacKay
1967-2016
With sadness we pass on the news that Prof. Sir
David MacKay,
FRS, Regius Professor of Engineering, visitor to TCM from 2013,
has passed away after a battle with cancer. His enthusiasm, broad
interest in science, and genius for communication made him a pleasure
to know.
Many obituaries have been published, including in
The Guardian,
The Telegraph,
and
Bill Gates' blog.
18th March
We congratulate
Gunnar Möller
on his appointment to a Lectureship in theoretical condensed matter physics
at the
University of Kent at Canterbury.
26th February
We congratulate
Jonathan
Lloyd-Williams on passing his PhD viva. He will remain in TCM as a
postdoc.
18th January
We congratulate
Dr Danny
Cole on being appointed to a lectureship in computational
medicinal chemistry at Newcastle
University. He will be much missed when he leaves in July.
12th January
We congratulate
Edgar Engel
on being offered a four year Junior Research Fellowship by
Trinity College.
2015
31st December
TCM congratulates
Prof Sir David
Mackay on receiving a knighthood in the
Queen's New Year honours list for services to Scientific Advice in
Government and Science Outreach.
23rd December
TCM celebrates Christmas two days early because all members now have complete web profiles. Merry Christmas and best wishes for the new year!
7th December
We congratulate Antoniya Aleksandrova on passing
her PhD viva.
1st December
We congratulate Teresa Krieger on passing her PhD viva.
25th November
TCM is delighted that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, has
commited £75 million to rebuild the Cavendish Laboratory.
9th November
We congratulate Jian-Hao Li
on passing his PhD viva.
2nd November
We are delighted that
Dr Rutter
has been re-elected unopposed to President of the UCU Cambridge branch.
18th October
TCM member Graham Spink awarded a Lectureship in the Chemical Engineering Department
at the University of Chester.
12th October
Prof Simons delivered the
Larmor Lecture
to the Cambridge
Philosophical Society. His title was
"The statistical physics of stem
cell biology: Dicing with fate".
1st October
We congratulate
Dr Hannezo
on taking a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, and
Dr Hofmann on taking a Research Fellowship at Caius College.
As the new academic year starts, TCM welcomes fifteen new
PhD students and visiting students, and five new post docs,
visitors and Fellows.
18th September
Prof. Mark Warner's" The Isaac Physics Project" shortlisted for The Times Higher Education Awards 2015 Outstanding Digital Innovation in Teaching or Research award.
15th to 18th September
TCM hosted a Onetep
Masterclass from 15th to 18th September attended by thirty
researchers from the UK & Europe.
20th July
Congratulations to Prof Simons on being awarded the Royal Society's
Gabor
Medal 2015 for his "work analysing stem cell lineages in development,
tissue homeostasis and cancer, revolutionising understanding of stem
cell behaviour in vivo".
10th July
TCM's new website goes live at 11:36. First bug report at 11:37.
7th May
It is with great sadness that we report the death of former
colleague, Professor Sir Sam Edwards.
Professor Sir Sam Edwards was the Cavendish Professor of Physics and Chairman of the Science Research Council.
18th March
Congratulations to TCM alumnus Prof Mike
Cates on being elected to the Lucasian
Chair of Mathematics. Prior to moving to a chair in Edinburgh,
Mike was a lecturer in TCM. Former holders of this chair include Profs
Stephen Hawking, Paul Dirac, and Isaac Newton.
18th March
Congratulations to Prof Chris Pickard on being elected to the Sir Alan Cottrell
Chair of Materials Science at Cambridge.
5th January
Dr Dmitry Kovrizhin is awarded an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship.
2005 to 2014
19th October
27th October

TCM congratulates Gunnar Lange on a successful PhD viva. Gunnar is now working at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, continuing his research on band topology.

TCM congratulates Matthew Evans on a successful PhD viva. Matthew continues to work as a BEWARE Research Fellow at UCLouvain with Prof Gian-Marco Rignanese, whilst continuing to develop research data management software for experimentalists within the group of Prof Dame Clare Grey, FRS, in Chemistry.
11th October

TCM congratulates Kamil Iwanowski on winning the best poster prize at the Lennard-Jones Centre showcase day. His poster on "Heat Transport in Disordered Carbon: Unraveling the Link between Bond Topology and Thermal Conductivity" described his final-year undergraduate project with Prof Csányi and Dr Simoncelli. Kamil has started a PhD in TCM with Dr Simoncelli and Prof Payne, and in collaboration with the experimental group of Prof Sirringhaus.
1st October


As the new Academic Year commences, TCM welcomes Associate Professor Anton Souslov and Asssitant Professor Christoph Schran as new members of the Group. Dr Souslov researches on soft matter, and Dr Schran on computational atomistic simulation, especially of water.
We also welcome eight new PhD students and postdocs. We wish our joiners a pleasant and productive time in the Group, and wish those who recently left every success.
1st September

Innovate UK has awarded a £1.6m two-year grant to Intellegens and CPI to "develop a novel machine learning-driven tool to advance oligonucleotide-therapeutic characterisation and manufacturing."
This project will use Alchemite™, developed in TCM by Dr Gareth Conduit, to improve the productivity of manufacturing oligonucleotides. Oligonucleotides are a next-generation therapeutic, and have the potential to treat many diseases, but their synthesis is challenging.
21st July
TCM supports the British Physics Olympiad, and congratulates the British participants on their return from the 2023 International Physics Olympiad in Tokyo with three silver and two bronze medals. Dr Anson Cheung accompanied the team to Japan, Drs Gareth Conduit and John Biggins contributed to their training, and the BPhO website has been refreshed by Dr Michael Rutter.
Three of the above TCM members themselves won medals at the International Physics Olympiad when they were school-leavers.
4th July

TCM congratulates Dr Clara Wanjura on receiving the 2023 Sam Edwards Thesis Prize from the IoP's Theory of Condensed Matter Group for her work on Non-Hermitian Topology and Directional Amplification in Driven-Dissipative Cavity Arrays. The prize is for the thesis which "contributes most strongly to the advancement of theoretical condensed matter physics" and is open to all at institutions in the UK and Ireland. Clara is now working as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen.
24th June


TCM congratulates Drs Bartomeu Monserrat and John Biggins on on their recent successes in the University's annual academic promotions excercise. From 1st October 2023, they will both be Professors, a fitting recognition of their research and teaching excellence.
12th May

TCM congratulates Jonathan Nilsson Hallén on a successful viva. Jonathan will be spending the summer at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden where he will continue his research projects.
21st April

TCM congratulates Patrick Taylor on a successful viva. Patrick will move to become a postdoc in the Mechanical Engineering department at Imperial College where he will work with Dr Paul Hopper on using machine learning to detect defect formation during 3D printing of metals.
1st March

TCM congratulates Elis Roberts on a successful viva. Elis now moves to InstaDeep where he will be working as a machine learning research engineer in its biology team.
23rd February

TCM congratulates Dr Antonio Štrkalj on being elected to a Marie Skłodowska Curie postdoctoral fellowship. In the autumn he will leave TCM for the Department of Physics, University of Zagreb, Croatia, where he will take up this two-year Fellowship, continuing his work on two-dimensional many-body localisation.
16th December


Recent work by TCM PhD student Jonathan Nilsson Hallén, along with his supervisor Prof Claudio Castelnovo and collaborators in Germany, America and Argentina, has led to the discovery of a fractal pattern in a perfect crystal. Not only had a fractal not been observed in an undisordered crystal before, but this result explains puzzling experimental data stretching back for over a decade. This work has been published in the journal Science.
2nd December


TCM congratulates Siyu Chen on being awarded the annual Cavendish prize for the best paper in Computational Physics from a PhD student for his paper nonuniform grids for Brillouin zone integration and interpolation. We also congratulate Jonathan Nilsson Hallén on winning the annual Cavendish prize in Theoretical Physics. Both prizes were presented at the Graduate Student Conference on 1st December.
9th November


TCM belatedly congratulates both Ivona Bravic and Clara Wanjura on their successful PhD vivas. Ivona is now working in Berlin as a Sustainability Consultant in the renewable energy sector. Clara now works as a postdoc in Florian Marquardt's Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Erlangen.
1st October

As the new Academic Year commences, TCM welcomes three new Postdocs and Fellows, and eight new Graduate Students. TCM wishes its new members a pleasant and productive time in the Group, and wishes those leaving every success.
We particularly congratulate Dr Katarzyna Macieszczak as she moves to be an Assistant Professor in the Theoretical Physics Group at Warwick.
22nd September

TCM congratulates Dr Bartomeu Monserrat on being awarded the Young Investigator in Theoretical Physics prize by the Spanish Royal Physics Society for "his outstanding contribution to the theoretical physics of materials, developing new methods to calculate finite temperature and high pressure properties," which will "allow a better understanding of compounds of high technological relevance with implications in organic semiconductors, topological materials and photovoltaic cells."
30th August


TCM congratulates Angela Harper and Tobias Schaich on their successful PhD vivas. Angela is moving to the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin to start a postdoc under a Max Planck Fellowship, and Tobias hopes to continue his research on novel communications technologies.
27th June

TCM congratulates Dr Pieter Claeys on his recent move to the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems where he now heads his own Research Group on the Dynamics of Quantum Information.
20th June

TCM congratulates Dr Daniel Bennett on receiving the 2022 Sam Edwards Thesis Prize from the IoP's Theory of Condensed Matter Group. The prize is for the thesis which "contributes most strongly to the advancement of theoretical condensed matter physics," is open to all at institutions in the UK and Ireland, and includes a bottle of wine from Sir Sam's cellar, now owned by Caius College. Danny is now working as a postdoc at the University of Liège.
15th June

TCM congratulates Benjamin Remez on a successful PhD viva. Benji now leaves TCM to take up a Yale Prize Fellowship in Yale's Condensed Matter Theory Group.
5th May

TCM congratulates Andrea Pizzi on a successful PhD viva. Andrea is taking up a postdoc position at Harvard before returning as a Trinity College Junior Research Fellow.
3rd May

TCM congratulates its alumni Drs David O'Regan and Paul Eastham on being elected as Fellows of Trinity College Dublin last month.
8th April

TCM is delighted to have received a £3.67m grant from EPSRC. This four-year grant, which includes collaborators from Materials Science, DAMTP and the Sanger Institute, provides flexible, long-term funding allowing TCM to continue to undertake the innovative, high risk, high reward research that, historically, has had significant impact.
21st March

TCM congratulates Nora Martin on her successful PhD viva. Nora is now continuing her research in Biological Physics as a postdoc in Oxford.
2nd March

TCM congratulates Rhys Goodall on successfully completing his PhD. Rhys is currently working at a start-up in California.
11th February

TCM congratulates Bo Peng on being awarded a Magdalene College Junior Research Fellowship. He will remain in TCM working on applications of Density Functional Theory.
11th February

TCM congratulates Nick Woods on successfully completing his PhD. His thesis has joined the many others downloadable from our thesis page.
24th January

TCM congratulates Andrea Pizzi on being awarded a Trinity College Junior Research Fellowship to further his research on nonequilibrium many-body systems. Before starting at Trinity, Andrea will move to Harvard as a postdoc in Prof Norman Yao's group.
11th January

TCM congratulates Dr Robert-Jan Slager on being awarded an European Research Council Starting Grant of over £1m to continue his work on multi-gap topological physics. His work applies elegant mathematical principles to real materials, predicting observable phenomena, and is particularly relevant to the fields of electronics and quantum computing.
4th January

With great sadness we report the death of Prof Mark Warner, FRS, following a short illness. Mark had a distinguished career in soft condensed matter, particularly liquid crystals. He was also devoted to widening access to Physics and Mathematics at school level, being instrumental in setting up the Senior Physics Challenge followed by Isaac Physics. Following his recent retirement, he retained a post that allowed him to continue his research and outreach.
7th December

TCM congratulates Jessica Halliday on her successful PhD viva. Jessica is now working for Bain & Company in London.
30th November

TCM congratulates Dr Bartomeu Monserrat on being awarded the 2021 James Clerk Maxwell Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics. The citation highlights his "exceptional contributions to the development of computational techniques that bring temperature to modern electronic structure methods, and their application to topological materials, photovoltaics, superconductors and planetary physics."
29th November


TCM congratulates Bo Peng on being awarded the annual Cavendish prize for the best paper in Computational Physics from a PhD student. It was awarded for Topological phonons in oxide perovskites controlled by light, published in Science Advances. We also congratulate Gunnar Lange who won a runner-up prize for the best talk at the Cavendish Graduate Student Conference.
19th November

TCM congratulates Daniel Bennett on a successful PhD viva. Danny is now working as a postdoc with Prof Philippe Ghosez at the University of Liège.
19th November



TCM congratulates three PhD students, Gunnar Lange, Patrick Taylor and Jack Whaley-Baldwin, on their recent attendance of an Nvidia CUDA/python workshop.
8th October


As the new Academic Year commences, TCM wishes its new members a pleasant and productive time in the Group, and wishes those leaving every success.
We also congratulate Dr Nur Ünal on being elected as a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Trinity College, and Prof Claudio Castelnovo on being elected a Fellow of the Max Planck Society at the Max Plank Graduate Centre for Quantum Materials. Both remain in TCM.
20th September

TCM congratulates Michael Hutcheon on a successful PhD viva. Michael has moved to Nottingham to start a postdoc in the Quantum Electronic Structure Techniques group of Dr Andrew Teale.
13th September

TCM congratulates Dr Bingqing Cheng on being awarded the Volker Heine Young Investigator Award by Psi-k.
4th August

TCM congratulates Dr Bingqing Cheng as she starts to set up her own research group in the IST, Austria, where she will continue to develop methods to extend the scope of atomistic simulations. She takes up her new post of Assistant Professor at the start of September.
24th June

TCM congratulates Dr Jan Behrends on being awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship which he will take up in January. He will remain in TCM continuing his research on topology and many-body chaos.
10th June

TCM congratulates Max McGinley on being awarded the Institute of Physics' Theory of Condensed Matter Group's Sam Edwards Thesis Prize for his thesis Dynamical Aspects of Topological Quantum Systems. Max is currently a postdoc at Oxford, but is expected to return to TCM and his Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College.
10th June

TCM congratulates Can Koçer on his successful PhD viva. Can is now working as a Data Science Fellow at the AI company faculty.
17th May

TCM congratulates Alice Shipley on her successful PhD viva. She will soon start work with Goldman Sachs as a Quantitative Engineer.
6th May

TCM congratulates Prof Ben Simons on his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Prof Simons has a distinguished research record in a broad range of fields from quantum condensed matter physics to developmental biology, particularly the regulation of stem cells. His experimental work is based at the Gurdon Institute, and he was TCM's Head of Group for several years before moving to DAMTP.
9th April

Prof Volker Heine's book on Group Theory now has a Hindi translation, thanks to the work of Prof KS Sharma at IIS. Prof Heine has donated his share of the royalties to fund an annual medal for the top MSc student in Physics there, and the first medal has just been awarded.
19th March

TCM is very sorry to learn of the death, on 15th March, of Prof. Neil Ashcroft. Neil came to Cambridge from New Zealand to undertake a PhD under Prof Volker Heine. He graduated in 1964, and remained a regular visitor to TCM after moving to America where he enjoyed a distinguished career. He co-authored the seminal text-book Solid State Physics with David Mermin, and his foundational works on superconductivity in atomic hydrogen underpin the recent advances in room temperature superconductivity in metallic hydrides.
16th March


TCM congratulates Dr Pieter Claeys and Prof Austen Lamacraft on their paper entitled Ergodic and Nonergodic Dual-Unitary Quantum Circuits with Arbitrary Local Hilbert Space Dimension being selected for the front cover of Physical Review Letters, as well as being an Editors' Suggestion. One can also read their summary of this work.
9th March


TCM congratulates Attila Szabó and Philipp Verpoort on their successful PhD vivas. Attila has already moved to a Junior Research Fellowship at Wadham College, Oxford, and Philipp has since secured a job at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
25th February

TCM congratulates Mark Johnson on a successful PhD viva. Mark will remain in TCM for the immediate future.
22nd February

3D printing is the latest area to benefit from the machine learning capabilities of Alchemite, the versatile deep learning platform developed by Dr Gareth Conduit and commercialised by Intellegens. A collaboration between Ansys and Intellegens will help to optimise many aspects of the 3D printing process.
26th January

Physics World, the magazine of the Institute of Physics, has named the Josephson Effect as one of the ten greatest predictions in Physics.
18th January

Intellegens has announced a collaboration with the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and Boeing to use Intellegens' machine learning algorithms to develop new metal alloys for aerospace applications as part of the National Aerospace Technology Exploitation Programme. The algorithms used were developed in TCM by Dr Gareth Conduit, CTO of Intellegens.
6th January

TCM belatedly congratulates James Darby on a successful PhD viva last Term. James is now working as a postdoc for Prof Gábor Csányi of the Engineering Department, and will doubtless stay in close contact with TCM.
26th November

TCM congratulates Clara Wanjura on being awarded the Cavendish's annual postgraduate theory prize for her paper entitled Topological framework for directional amplification in driven-dissipative cavity arrays published in Nature Communications. She will present this work at the Cavendish's Postgraduate Student Conference.
16th November

TCM congratulates Darryl Foo on his successful PhD viva. Darryl now has a research fellowship working with Prof Shaffique Adam in the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials in the National University of Singapore.
4th November

TCM congratulates Dr Johannes Hofmann on his appointment as a Senior Lecturer in the Physics Department of the University of Gothenburg.
4th November

TCM congratulates Alex Wade on his successful PhD viva. Alex is now a postdoc working with Prof Peter Coveney in UCL.
31st October

Dr Gareth Conduit and TCM alumnus Dr Tom Whitehead of Intellegens, along with TCM alumni Drs Matt Segall and Ben Irwin of Optibrium, have launched Cerella, an artifical intelligence software platform for drug discovery. Cerella uses deep learning methods from Alchemite, which is developed by Dr Conduit.
23rd October

TCM congratulates Dr Bingqing Cheng on being awarded a Departmental Early Career Academic Fellowship by the Department of Computer Science. Dr Cheng will remain affiliated to TCM as she starts this Fellowship and continues her research in machine learning as applied to properties of materials.
We also congratulate Dr Jan Behrends on being elected to a Fellowship at Darwin College.
1st October

TCM congratulates Dr Alpha Lee on the award of a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship to support his research activities on the design of new materials and drugs. He uses physical insights and statistical methods to develop models that can learn from large data sets.
18th September

TCM congratulates Prof Volker Heine FRS on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Volker arrived in the Cavendish from New Zealand in 1954 to study for a PhD under Sir Nevill Mott, and soon joined the new Solid State Theory group, later renamed TCM. He was its Head from 1975 until 1997, and one of the founders of the Psi-k network. He has made many contributions to theoretical and computational electronic structure research, and remains active in TCM.
15th September

TCM congratulates Max McGinley on his successful PhD viva. Max is moving to a postdoc position at Oxford University's Physics Department.
14th September

TCM congratulates Nicolò Forcellini on his successful PhD viva. Nicolò is now moving to a postdoc position at the BAQIS (Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences) and Tsinghua University.
3rd September

TCM congratulates Petr Zapletal on his successful PhD viva. Petr is now moving to a postdoc position at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
27th August

TCM congratulates Dr Gareth Conduit on being offered a three year extension to his Royal Society University Research Fellowship. He will remain in TCM continuing his research applying machine learning to designing new materials and drugs.
7th August

TCM congratulates Attila Szabó on being elected to the Keeley-Rutherford Junior Research Fellowship at Wadham College where he will work with groups from both the Rudolf Peierls Centre and ISIS.
27th July

Dr Jerelle Joseph has shared her experience of doing a PhD at Cambridge in an interview with DiscoverPhDs.
27th July

TCM congratulates Stephen Spurrier on successfully defending his PhD thesis. Stephen now works on machine learning for Tesco in London.
24th July


TCM congratulates Dr Rosana Collepardo on her joint lectureship in Chemistry and Genetics. She describes her research and her career in this short video. Similarly we congratulate Dr Andreas Nunnenkamp on his proleptic Assistant Professorship at the University of Nottingham. We are pleased that both will remain affiliated with TCM as they look after their teams and projects based here.
6th July

TCM gets a new look to its home page. The old style, with its three tabs, is recorded above, and can still be seen.
2nd July

TCM congratulates Yu Yang Liu on his successful PhD viva. Yang is moving on to a postdoc in MIT before returning to A*STAR in Singapore
2nd July
Liverpool F.C. wins the Premier League, aided by the data analysis team led by Dr Ian Graham, former member of TCM.
1st July

TCM congratulates Dr Sebastian Ahnert as he starts a lectureship in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. His new Department is not far from TCM, and we expect him to maintain his links with TCM.
24th June


Dr Bartomeu Monserrat has launched a YouTube channel dedicated to explaining Quantum Mechanics, and Dr Michael Rutter has launched a small website of some Maths and Physics experiments one can do on a Raspberry Pi.
15th June

TCM congratulates Dr Bartomeu Monserrat on being named by JPhys Materials as an Emerging Leader 2020 for his development of first principles quantum mechanical methods to study material properties at non-zero temperatures.
8th June


The fourth OPTIMADE workshop to develop a common API to access materials databases is running this week, hosted by CECAM (virtually) at Lausanne. The workshop is co-organized by Dr Conduit, with Matthew Evans helping to lead the development of an open source python library.
4th June

TCM congratulates Ezequiel Rodriguez Chiacchio on successfully defending his PhD thesis in his viva.
29th May
A team of TCM PhD students, Yu Yang Liu, Lupeng Yang and Siyu Chen, won prizes in the Future of Blockchain competition. They applied the blockchain to train multiple machine learning models collaboratively while keeping data private. Their platform, DeepVerse, was initiated and is developed by Yu Yang Liu.
18th May

TCM congratulates Dr Nur Ünal as she starts her Royal Society Newton International Fellowship whilst remaining in TCM. She will be working on topology in ultracold quantum gases far from equilibrium.
1st May

TCM congratulates Dr Sarah Teichmann on her election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Her research, on protein complexes, and on gene regulation in the immune system, bridges computational and experimental molecular biology. It has produced insights into cancer, and into respiratory and auto-immune diseases. She is also the co-founder and co-leader of the Human Cell Atlas consortium.
30th April
The entry to the Open Source Malaria prize by TCM members Dr Gareth Conduit & Alex Wade and TCM alumni Dr Ben Irwin, Dr Tom Whitehead & Dr Matthew Segall has been experimentally verified as the most potent compound submitted. It was discovered using the machine learning algorithm Alchemite™ invented and developed by Dr Conduit.
1st April

The TCM Group is very sorry to learn of the death, on 29th March, of Prof. Philip W. Anderson, one of the most influential condensed matter theorists. Phil was Head of TCM from 1967 to 1975, and delighted to point out that, in naming the Group, he coined the term "condensed matter physics." In 1977 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with John Van Vleck and Sir Nevill Mott) for "fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems."
Obituaries: Physics World, New York Times.
4th March
TCM replaces its failing coffee machine with a new model, one which contains much more electronics than the previous ones.
14th February

TCM congratulates Max McGinley on being elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College to further his research on the behaviour of complex quantum systems.
24th January

Congratulations to Will Grant on passing his PhD viva. Will is moving to California to pursue his career.
12th January

Scientists from all around the world gathered to celebrate Mike Payne's 60th Birthday on 11 January 2020. The Old Library at Pembroke College provided a splendid backdrop for the event, at which the audience heard about Mike's lofty scientific achievements, in particular the development and commercialization of the venerable CASTEP and ONETEP codes, and colleagues former and present reminisce about their time with Mike in Cambridge. The day was finished off with a fine Dinner in Pembroke.
7th January

Angela Harper, one of TCM's PhD students, has been interviewed for the University's Research News pages, where she discusses her computational research in lithium-ion battery materials and her work with Women in STEM programmes.
12th December



A neural network developed jointly by Intellegens and Optibrium is one of the winners of the Open Source Malaria prize for predicting new anti-malarial compounds. Their model was based on Alchemite, an algorithm developed by Dr Gareth Conduit, and TCM alumni Drs Whitehead and Irwin worked to apply it to this particular task.
6th December

Congratulations to Andrea Pizzi on winning the Abdus Salam theory prize at the 2019 Cavendish Graduate Student Conference.
21st November

TCM congratulates Dr Bartomeu Monserrat on being appointed to a lectureship in the Department of Materials Science. The Department is only a few hundred yards away, and we hope to continue to work closely with Dr Monserrat after he takes up his new post in January.
12th November

29th October

TCM congratulates Beñat Mencia on passing his PhD viva. Beñat is now working on machine learning for Bosch in California.
3rd October


As the new Academic Year commences, TCM congratulates Prof Austen Lamacraft on promotion to being a professor, and Dr Jorge R Espinosa on gaining a Fellowship at Emmanuel College.
The Group also welcomes six new postdocs and visitors, and twelve new graduate students. We wish all a pleasant a productive time in the Group.
12th September

TCM congratulates Kevin Duff on passing his PhD viva. Kevin now works for Enthought in its Cambridge offices.
2nd September

TCM congratulates Edward Linscott on passing his PhD viva. Edward will be moving to the group of TCM alumnus Nicola Marzari at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.
26th July
We are delighted that TCM alumna, Dr Alix Pryde, has been elected to the Institute of Physics Council. She takes on this role on top of her other responsibilites as Director of Service Strategy and Operational Delivery at Sky UK and a Non-Executive Director at the King's College Hospital NHS Trust.
2nd July
We are delighted that, in this year's IoP Awards, Prof Mark Warner was awarded the Bragg Medal, jointly with Dr Lisa Jardine-Wright, for setting up and directing the Isaac Physics programme which "has revolutionised physics education for teachers and students in an extraordinary number of UK schools."
Prof Nigel Cooper received the Lord Rayleigh medal "for profound contributions to the quantum theory of many-particle systems, concerning both topological phases of cold atoms in artificial gauge fields and novel phenomena in electronic materials."
6th June

The first TCM research formal of the 2018-19 academic year took place on Thursday 6 June at St John's College. A fun night was had by all, hopefully the first of many!
22nd May

A pioneering application of machine learning by Gareth Conduit has been experimentally proven to predict accurately the properties of metal-organic frameworks. This class of materials has many promising applications including the extraction water from the air in the desert and the storage of dangerous gases including in hydrogen-based cars.
16th May

Danny Bennett has appeared on National Television speaking about his voluntary work to encourage people to sign up to be stem cell donors.
30th April

TCM congratulates Chris Parmee on successfully defending his PhD thesis. We wish him well for the future.
8th April

Image ©Nobel Media AB / Pi Frisk
It is with great sadness that we report the death of former colleague, Prof David Thouless. Prof Thouless held posts in TCM in the 1960s and 1980s, and was a frequent Summer visitor thereafter whilst working at the University of Washington, Seattle. His illustrious career contributing to the theory of phases of matter culminated in the award of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, which he is shown above left receiving from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.
22nd March

We welcome Dr Bingqing Cheng who has just joined the Group as a Junior Research Fellow of Trinity College. She has recently completed her PhD at EPFL, working on statistical mechanics and atomistic modelling.
22nd February

Congratulations to Nontawit Cheewaruangroj for passing his PhD viva today. Nontawit is going on to work on public policy in science and technology for the Thai government.
17th January

Three TCM researchers, Yu Yang Liu, Bart Andrews, and Gareth Conduit, had their paper "Direct evaluation of the force constant matrix in quantum Monte Carlo" selected as Editors' Pick in the Journal of Chemical Physics 150, 034104 (2019). Well done!
3rd January

TCM congratulates Bart Andrews on passing his PhD viva. Bart is currently working as a postdoc in the University of Zurich.
13th December

TCM congratulates Ben Irwin on passing his PhD viva. Ben leaves us to work with a local company applying machine learning to drug design.
3rd December

TCM congratulates Alice Allen on passing her PhD viva. Alice remains in Cambridge, taking up a postdoc position with Prof Gábor Csányi in the Engineering Department.
29th November

Prof Mark Warner has just published Pre-University Mathematics for Sciences, the latest in a series of Sixth Form level text books aimed particularly at the Physical Sciences and available at isaacbooks.org. The series is sold at cost price, £1 per book, and over 120,000 copies have been sold.
15th November

TCM congratulates Dr Katarzyna Macieszczak on taking up the Henslow Research Fellowship at Selwyn College. She will remain in TCM as she continues her research on non-equilibrium quantum systems.
10th October

Dr Gareth Conduit has won a £1M InnovateUK award alongside Optibrium and the Medicines Discovery Catapult to use deep learning to improve the efficiency and productivity of drug discovery.
1st October

We congratulate Prof Ben Simons on the award of a Royal Society EP Abraham Research Professorship. He moves to DAMTP, and he will also establish an experimental lab. Ben has been central to activities in TCM and the Cavendish for many years, through his outstanding record of research across disciplines, and through his leadership, notably as Head of the TCM Group. We wish him every success in his new activities, and are pleased that he has chosen to remain co-affiliated with TCM.
30th September
As the new academic year starts TCM welcomes over a dozen new PhD students and two new postdocs, Drs Jan Behrends and Shovan Dutta. We wish all our new members a pleasant and productive time in the Group.
With the close of the 2017-18 academic year we express our best wishes to those who recently left TCM, moving to a variety of fulfilling positions in the UK and beyond.
11th September

Dr Gareth Conduit and startup Intellegens have licensed their deep learning code Alchemite™ to Optibrium for resale to clients in drug discovery. Optibrium CEO, Dr Matt Segall, who completed his PhD in TCM, comments "their deep learning technology, already proven in the field of materials design, has shown remarkable results when applied to challenging drug discovery".
10th September

Congratulations to Daniel Malz for passing his PhD viva. Daniel will shortly leave us to take up a postdoc postition at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics at Munich.
9th September
Daniel Rowlands passed his PhD viva and will take up a position in the Catholic Church.
8th September

We congratulate Dr Johannes Hofmann as he moves from a Research Fellowship at Caius to be a College Teaching Officer at Peterhouse, and from TCM to DAMTP.
20th August

Congratulations to Ed Tait for passing his PhD viva. Ed is now working for a local software company.
21st July

Congratulations to Graham Spink on graduating his PhD. We wish Graham well for his lectureship at the University of Chester.
19th July

Congratulations to Adam Smith on a successful PhD viva. We wish Adam well for the future: in September he leaves us for a postdoc position in Germany.
22nd June

Congratulations to Max McGinley on winning the Nature Reviews Physics prize for the best poster at the ICTP Conference on Quantum Dynamics of Disordered Interacting Systems in Trieste.
8th June

Congratulations to Bruno Loureiro on a successful PhD viva. We wish Bruno well for the future.
23rd May

Congratulations to Dr Bartomeu Monserrat on receiving a five-year Winton Fellowship for research on ab initio computer modelling of materials at room temperature, with applications including solar cells. Dr Monserrat will remain a member of TCM, and is TCM's fifth Winton Fellow.
26th March

TCM congratulates Gabriel Constantinescu on a successful PhD viva. Gabriel now leaves us for the world of finance.
13th March

TCM is delighted that Bartomeu Monserrat won the Volker Heine Young Investigator award, presented at the German Physical Society's Spring Meeting.
14th February

TCM congratulates Angela Harper on receiving the American Physical Society's LeRoy Apker Award "for significant contributions to printed electronics research and outstanding leadership of the Society of Physics Students and Society of Women in STEM fields."
2nd February

TCM congratulates Joe Prentice on successfully defending his PhD thesis. Joe is now a postdoc at Imperial College.
23rd January

TCM congratulates Tom Whitehead on successfully defending his PhD thesis "Interacting Fermi Gases". Well done!
13th December

Cambridge Enterprise has provided funding for Intellegens, a spin-out company, co-founded by Gareth Conduit, which has developed proprietary algorithms to allow neural networks to be trained on incomplete data. The technique has already been applied to materials design and drug discovery, but is much more generally applicable.
8th December

Our congratulations to Dr Alex Chin who is moving to a permanent academic post at the CNRS, Paris, in the New Year.
8th December

Our congratulations to Dr Paulo Medeiros who is moving to a permanent post at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute in the New Year.
3rd November

We congratulate Dr Michael Rutter on being asked to serve another one-year term as President of the Cambridge Branch of the UCU.
1st November

We welcome Dr Karolina Milowska who has just joined the Group as a postdoc working with Prof Mike Payne using linear scaling DFT. She previously worked in the Materials Science Department.
1st October

The new academic year sees TCM welcoming many new members. We extend a particular welcome to Dr Benjamin Béri, who joins us from Birmingham University to take up a joint lectureship between Physics and DAMTP. We also welcome Drs Matteo Brunelli and Tom Hiscock as postdocs, Profs David Bowler and Claudio Chamon as sabbatical visitors, and over a dozen new PhD students.
We wish all our new members a pleasant and productive time in the Group.
26th September

We are pleased to report that Edouard Hannezo will take up a faculty position at the Institute of Science and Technology near Vienna.
26th September

Philip Greulich has moved to a lectureship in the Mathematics Department of the University of Southampton.
26th September

Steffen Rulands has moved to start his own Research Group in the Max-Planck Institute for Complex System, Dresden.
14th September

TCM congratulates Nicholas Worth for passing his PhD viva. Nicholas is currently working for MathWorks.
11th September

TCM congratuates Gareth Conduit for winning the Society of Chemical Industry presentation award.
8th September

We are pleased that Andrew Morris has been appointed to a Lectureship at Birmingham University from October. He will remain in close contact with his many collaborators in TCM, and we expect him to be a frequent visitor.
6th September

We congratulate Sarah Morgan on being awarded a Springer Thesis prize for her PhD thesis. Sarah is now a Research Associate in Cambridge Neuroscience.
22nd August

We are pleased that John Biggins has been appointed to a Lectureship in the Mechanics, Materials and Design Division of the Engineering Department, a position which he will take up in September. We are sure that John will retain strong links with TCM as he joins a Division already containing a TCM member, Prof Gábor Csányi.
1st August

We are pleased to report that Nigel Cooper has been selected as a 2017 Simons Investigator in Physics. The program provides "support for outstanding scientists in their most productive years, when they are establishing creative new research directions, providing leadership to the field and effectively mentoring junior scientists." Quoting from the citation, "Nigel has shown how to design optical lattices for cold atoms that provide controllable laboratories for exploring the physics of interacting particles in the presence of gauge fields. He is also known for foundational works on the topological Kondo effect and on quantum oscillations in topological insulators."
13th June

Dr Knolle's work as part of an international team including experimentalists from Oak Ridge National Lab has led to the observation of magnetic Majorana fermion quasiparticles. Neutron scattering experiments at very low temperatures in ruthenium trichloride showed close agreement to the theoretical quantum spin liquid predictions.
The image shows a neutron (blue line) scattering from RuCl3 producing a Majorana fermion (green wave) which disrupts the electron spins. Image credit Jill Hemman / ORNL press release.
31st May

TCM congratulates Joseph Nelson on passing his PhD viva. Joseph remains with us as a postdoc in Andrew Morris's group.
29th May

Drs Andrew Morris and Paulo Medeiros, with PhD student Jamie Wynn, have simulated the world's thinnest metallic nanowire, a 1D chain of tellurium inside a carbon nanotube. The computational simulations revealed a number of different configurations which the Te atoms take up within the nanotube as the tube's diameter varies in the range 0.7nm to 1.1nm, with only the thinnest tubes giving a linear chain rather than a helical twisted chain. Collaborators in the University of Warwick have shown that their predictions match the structures found experimentally.
18th May

TCM congratulates James Hamp on passing his PhD viva.
16th May

TCM congratulates Johannes Knolle on gaining a lectureship at Imperial College. He will take up this post at the start of the new academic year, and we are pleased that he intends to continue to collaborate closely with TCM.
15th May

TCM congratulates Yang Liu on winning a poster prize at the CCP9 Young Researchers event.
3rd May

TCM congratulates Salvatore Tesoro on passing his PhD viva.
15th March

TCM congratulates Lars Schonenberg on passing his PhD viva.
10th December

Image ©Nobel Media AB / Pi Frisk
TCM alumni Prof David Thouless (pictured) and Prof Duncan Haldane receive the Physics Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.
7th December

TCM celebrates its annual Christmas party, complete with traditional pantomime written, starred, and directed by the new 1st-year PhD students. Many thanks to all the new students, especially Mark Johnson for writing the pantomime and Ezequiel Rodriguez Chiacchio for leading the organisation. Merry Christmas to all!
4th November

We are delighted that Dr Rutter has been re-elected to President of the UCU Cambridge branch.
26th October

TCM congratulates Aurelio Romero-Bermudez on passing his PhD viva.
6th October

TCM congratulates Sarah Morgan on passing her PhD viva.
4th October
TCM is proud and delighted to announce that two of its alumni shared in the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics. Prof. David J. Thouless moved from the Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Department in Cambridge to take up a lectureship in the Solid State Theory group (the early incarnation of TCM) from 1964-65 before moving to the University of Birmingham, where he remained on the faculty for many years. In 1980, David returned to TCM as a Royal Society Research Professor, moving soon after to the University of Washington, Seattle. Fortunately, he remained a frequent Summer visitor to the group. Prof. F. Duncan M. Haldane was a graduate student in TCM working under the supervision of another Nobel Laureate from the group, Prof. Philip Anderson, and receiving his PhD in 1978 before transferring to a post-doctoral position at the Institut Laue-Langevin. . Together with Cavendish graduate Prof. J. Michael Kosterlitz, they received the Nobel Prize "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter". Further information can be found at the Nobel website.
1st October

TCM starts the academic year by welcoming eleven new PhD students to its ranks. We are also delighted that Prof Emilio Artacho is now full-time with TCM.
The previous academic year saw our members gain lectureships elsewhere, as well as many other achievements. At this time we particularly congratulate Prof Gábor Csányi, a postdoc in TCM from 2001 to 2007, on becoming a Professor in Cambridge's Engineering Department.
29th August

We congratulate Thomas Bilitewski on passing his PhD viva. Thomas has a position in a Max Plank Institute.
18th August

We congratulate Connie Hsueh on passing her MPhil viva. Connie is now a PhD student at Stanford University.
17th August

We congratulate Tom Price on passing his PhD viva. Tom recently started a postdoc position at Utrecht University.
13th July

We congratulate Edgar Engel on passing his PhD viva. Edgar will remain in TCM as a Trinity College Junior Research Fellow.
July

We congratulate Philip Greulich on his appointment to a Lectureship in Applied Mathematics at the University of Southampton.
15th April

Prof Sir David MacKay
1967-2016
With sadness we pass on the news that Prof. Sir David MacKay, FRS, Regius Professor of Engineering, visitor to TCM from 2013, has passed away after a battle with cancer. His enthusiasm, broad interest in science, and genius for communication made him a pleasure to know.
Many obituaries have been published, including in The Guardian, The Telegraph, and Bill Gates' blog.
18th March

We congratulate Gunnar Möller on his appointment to a Lectureship in theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
26th February

We congratulate Jonathan Lloyd-Williams on passing his PhD viva. He will remain in TCM as a postdoc.
18th January

We congratulate Dr Danny Cole on being appointed to a lectureship in computational medicinal chemistry at Newcastle University. He will be much missed when he leaves in July.
12th January

We congratulate Edgar Engel on being offered a four year Junior Research Fellowship by Trinity College.
31st December

TCM congratulates Prof Sir David Mackay on receiving a knighthood in the Queen's New Year honours list for services to Scientific Advice in Government and Science Outreach.
23rd December
TCM celebrates Christmas two days early because all members now have complete web profiles. Merry Christmas and best wishes for the new year!7th December
We congratulate Antoniya Aleksandrova on passing her PhD viva.
1st December
We congratulate Teresa Krieger on passing her PhD viva.
25th November

TCM is delighted that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, has commited £75 million to rebuild the Cavendish Laboratory.
9th November
We congratulate Jian-Hao Li on passing his PhD viva.
2nd November
We are delighted that Dr Rutter has been re-elected unopposed to President of the UCU Cambridge branch.
18th October

TCM member Graham Spink awarded a Lectureship in the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Chester.
12th October
Prof Simons delivered the Larmor Lecture to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. His title was "The statistical physics of stem cell biology: Dicing with fate".
1st October
We congratulate Dr Hannezo on taking a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, and Dr Hofmann on taking a Research Fellowship at Caius College.
As the new academic year starts, TCM welcomes fifteen new PhD students and visiting students, and five new post docs, visitors and Fellows.
18th September
Prof. Mark Warner's" The Isaac Physics Project" shortlisted for The Times Higher Education Awards 2015 Outstanding Digital Innovation in Teaching or Research award.15th to 18th September
TCM hosted a Onetep Masterclass from 15th to 18th September attended by thirty researchers from the UK & Europe.
20th July

Congratulations to Prof Simons on being awarded the Royal Society's Gabor Medal 2015 for his "work analysing stem cell lineages in development, tissue homeostasis and cancer, revolutionising understanding of stem cell behaviour in vivo".
10th July

TCM's new website goes live at 11:36. First bug report at 11:37.
7th May

18th March

Congratulations to TCM alumnus Prof Mike Cates on being elected to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics. Prior to moving to a chair in Edinburgh, Mike was a lecturer in TCM. Former holders of this chair include Profs Stephen Hawking, Paul Dirac, and Isaac Newton.
18th March

Congratulations to Prof Chris Pickard on being elected to the Sir Alan Cottrell Chair of Materials Science at Cambridge.
5th January
Dr Dmitry Kovrizhin is awarded an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship.