MSE professor Kristin Persson named to Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Kristin Persson, Daniel M. Tellep Distinguished Professor of materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley and a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been elected as a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in its 2024 Class for Chemistry.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was founded in 1739 as “an independent organisation, whose overall objective is to promote the sciences and strengthen their influence in society.” It consists of approximately 480 Swedish and 175 foreign members, “who together represent the country’s foremost expertise in the sciences.” Since 1901, the Academy has awarded the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry.

“It is truly an honor for me to be recognized by the oldest Academy of my home country,” said Persson. “The goal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences resonates strongly with me, as I have focused my career on the realization, adoption and democratization of large-scale, computed materials data, for the benefit of engineers and scientists worldwide. I am excited to be part of Sweden’s strong legacy in chemistry and materials science.”

Persson studies the physics and chemistry of materials using high-performance computing technology and is the director and founder of the Materials Project, a multinational effort to compute the properties of all inorganic materials and provide the data and associated analysis algorithms free of charge. In addition, her research group focuses on the data-driven computational design and prediction of new materials for clean energy production and storage applications.

She is also the director of the Molecular Foundry, a national user facility managed by the U.S. Department of Energy at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Last year, Persson was elected a lifetime Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She also was named a 2023 Fellow by the Materials Research Society and selected as the recipient of the Cyril Stanley Smith Award by the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. In 2021, she was named a fellow of the American Physical Society.