Michele Parrinello

Michele Parrinello (born 7 September 1945, Messina) is an Italian physicist particularly known for his work in molecular dynamics (the computer simulation of physical movements of atoms and molecules). Parrinello and Roberto Car were awarded the Dirac Medal and the Sidney Fernbach Award in 2009 for their continuing development of the Car-Parrinello method, first proposed in their seminal 1985 paper, "Unified Approach for Molecular Dynamics and Density-Functional Theory".

Life and career
Michele Parinello was born in Messina (Sicily) and received his Laurea in physics from the University of Bologna in 1968. After working at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, the IBM research laboratory in Zurich, and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, he was appointed Professor of Computational Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 2001, a position he also holds at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano. In 2004 he was elected to Great Britain's Royal Society. In 2011 he was awarded the Marcel Benoist Prize. In 2020 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute) in Chemistry. He currently has an h-index of 142, which is one of the highest among all scientists.

Selected notable contributions
 Car–Parrinello Molecular Dynamics (the original paper on this is now the 5th most highly cited paper in Physical Review Letters)
 Parrinello-Rahman Algorithm
 Metadynamics

References

Further reading
Andreoni, W. ; Marx, D.; Sprik, M. (2005). "Editorial: a tribute to Michele Parrinello: from physics via chemistry to biology", ChemPhysChem, Volume 6, Issue 9 (Special Issue: Parrinello Festschrift)
Car, R. and Parrinello, M. (1985). "Unified Approach for Molecular Dynamics and Density-Functional Theory" Physical Review Letters, Vol. 55, Issue 22
Kühne, T. D.; Krack, M.; Mohamed, F. R. and Parrinello, M. (2007). "Efficient and Accurate Car-Parrinello-like Approach to Born-Oppenheimer Molecular Dynamics" Physical Review Letters, Vol. 98, 066401

External links
 Parrinello Research Group at ETH Zürich.

Category:1945 births
Category:Living people
Category:Italian physicists
Category:People from Messina
Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Category:Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Category:Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences
Category:University of Lugano faculty
Category:Schrödinger Medal recipients
Category:Computational chemists
Category:Computational physicists