Venkat Kapil

Venkat Kapil has established himself as a leading researcher in theoretical chemistry and computational materials science. Born on August 24, 1993, he completed his integrated 5-year M.S. in Chemistry from IIT Kanpur in 2015, where he earned the Academic Excellence Award and Charpak Scholarship. He then pursued his Ph.D. in Materials Science at EPFL under Michele Ceriotti, completing it in 2020 with a thesis on "Nuclear Quantum Effects - Fast and Accurate." His research combines machine learning, electronic structure, and statistical mechanics to develop computationally efficient techniques for crystal structure prediction and phase-diagram calculations. After his Ph.D., he received the SNSF Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship and worked as a visiting research fellow at the University of Cambridge until 2022. He currently serves as an Oppenheimer Research Fellow at Cambridge's Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry and holds a Sydney Harvey Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College. Kapil is also a key developer of the i-PI scientific code, which integrates forcefield and first-principles software for molecular simulations. His work focuses particularly on predicting the behavior of nanoconfined water systems and developing innovative approaches to quantum mechanical simulations.