The ceremony will be held on 14 January 2027 at ICTP, during the Centre’s 23rd International Workshop on Computational Physics and Materials Science: Total Energy and Force Methods.

Wan-Jian Yin is a Professor at Soochow University, China. He earned his PhD in Theoretical Physics from Fudan University in Shanghai. Following his doctoral studies, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, USA, and later as a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo, USA. He joined Soochow University in 2015. He serves as an Associate Editor for journals including Computational Materials Science and AI Materials. His research focuses on AI physics and materials design. Recently, he has integrated first-principles calculations and machine-learning methods to accelerate materials discovery. His group has realized full-space inverse materials design via the D3REAM code, and developed PIRAG-LM, a physics-informed retrieval-augmented generation large-language model for inorganic-materials synthesis planning.

The Walter Kohn Prize was established in 2016 by ICTP and the Quantum ESPRESSO Foundation (QEF) in honour of Chemistry Nobel Laureate Walter Kohn, a leading condensed matter physicist who developed density functional theory (DFT), a method that drastically reduces the amount of computing power needed to model the properties of complex materials, without compromising the accuracy of a model’s simulations. DFT has already had a big impact on a wide variety of fields, including chemistry, molecular physics, medicine and engineering. It also has opened the door to contributions from scientists from disadvantaged countries who have no access to huge supercomputers, due to its low computing costs and the wide availability of open source modeling software. The prize is awarded jointly by ICTP and the QEF every two years.


All are welcome to attend. Light refreshments will be served in the lobby after the event.