Alex Zunger

Alex Zunger is an Israeli- American physicist, who deals with computer simulation in materials science.

Zunger studied at the University of Tel Aviv in Joshua Jortner and Benyamin Englman. As a post - graduate student, he was from 1975 to 1977 at Northwestern University in AJ Freeman and the University of California, Berkeley with Marvin Cohen ( as a fellow of IBM). From 1978 he worked at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL ), where he founded the Solid State Research Group and managed (until 2011 ). At the same time he became a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. In 1984 he was senior scientist at NREL and 1991 Institute Research Fellow. He is there today at the Institute for Inverse Design.

Zunger since the late 1970s, a pioneer in the development of ab initio pseudopotential methods in density functional theory with applications to real materials, for example in photovoltaics and semiconductor nanostructures. For example, he developed in 1981 with John Perdew the self-interaction correction, and he is co-developer of the momentum space total energy method (1978). More recently, he deals with inverse band structure calculations, the application of quantum mechanical methods to synthesize materials with desired properties.

In 2001 he received the Aneesur -Rahman Prize for pioneering work on the mathematical foundations of the ab initio theory of electronic structure of solids. In 2009 he held the Gutenberg Lecture at the University of Mainz. He received the 2001 Bardeen Award of the TMS (The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society ) for outstanding contributions to the understanding and prediction of spontaneous order in alloys.