Galli uses theoretical and computational methods to predict the properties of complex materials, encompassing solids, liquids and nanostructures. “We work in close collaboration with experimentalists to invent strategies to interpret complex measurements, as well as to discover new materials with targeted properties. For example, energy-related applications, ” Galli said.
Her research in developing computational procedures for simulating water behavior also is relevant to the institute’s water initiative. The methods and techniques she and her associates have developed over the years to predict the properties of liquids at the molecular level may now help lead to major advances in engineering approaches to improved use of water resources.
A fellow of the American Physical Society, Galli has received many honors, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s Award of Excellence and the Lawrence Livermore Science and Technology Award. Her move to Chicago will bring her much closer to one of her many research sponsors, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
She and her associates make significant use of the facility’s computers through a sizable award of computer time through the Department of Energy’s INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computation Impact on Theory and Experiment) program over the last several years.
“We have greatly benefited from the help and collaboration of the technical staff at the Advanced Leadership Computing Facility. I’m looking forward to strengthening our collaboration with ALCF teams, ” Galli said.
Galli graduated summa cum laude, in physics, from the University of Modena, Italy, in 1982. She then attended the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, receiving a master’s degree in 1984 and a doctorate in 1986, both in physics. Postdoctoral fellowships followed for Galli at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at the IBM Research Division in Zurich, Switzerland.
Galli continued her career at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she led the Quantum Simulations Group.
Cleland is a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and associate director of the California Nanosystems Institute at UCSB. Formerly he served as associate director of the Center for Nanoscale Innovation for Defense at UCSB.
Cleland specializes in quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum sensors, all of which depend upon harnessing the peculiar properties of quantum mechanics—the physics that dominates the atomic world and has recently been shown to apply to macroscopic mechanical objects as well as electrical circuits.
