2019 Berni J. Alder CECAM prize ceremony

Prof. Sauro Succi is a leading scientist at the Italian Institute of Technology and the Center for Life Nanosciences at the University of Rome La Sapienza. He is a pioneer of the Lattice-Boltzmann method. In 1989, he was instrumental for the first Lattice-Boltzmann nonlinear flow simulation and, shortly after, for contributing to the highly influential “top-down” interpretation. Following these groundbreaking contributions, he authored a multitude of early fluid-dynamic applications and spearheaded developments which made the approach suitable for modeling flows far from equilibrium, up to inserting the Lattice-Boltzmann method into a multi-scale approach. Over the decades, he has obtained outstanding results. He has continued to lay out and to consolidate the foundations of the Lattice-Boltzmann method, to open it up to new applications and to extend the approach beyond hydrodynamics into new territories of micro- and nano-fluidics, porous media, soft matter, and electronic transport. Over the decades, he has obtained outstanding results. He has continued to lay out and to consolidate the foundations of the Lattice-Boltzmann method, to open it up to new applications and to extend the approach beyond hydrodynamics into new territories of micro- and nano-fluidics, porous media, soft matter, and electronic transport. In addition, he has been pivotal in building and constantly inspiring a community now counting tens of thousands of researchers in academia and industry.

The Berni J. Alder CECAM Prize recognizes exceptional contributions to the field of microscopic simulation of matter. The prize is meant to honour an individual scientist; exceptionally it can be awarded to at most three scientists having equally contributed to the specific topic for which the prize is granted. This is the most prestigious European prize for computer simulations in condensed matter physics/chemistry, statistical physics and physical chemistry. The prize, awarded every three years, was created in 1999. On Sept. 11 2019, he became the 11^th awardee of the Berni J. Alder CECAM prize. The award ceremony was part of a special plenary session at the Conference “Molecular and materials simulation at the turn of the decade: Celebrating 50 years of CECAM”, featuring an introductory remote speech by Berni Alder and the awarding by previous prize recipient Hardy Gross.