UChicago PME Materials Seminar: Professor Berend Smit

Nanoporous Materials in the Age of Data: Are We Still Doing Science?

Berend Smit is Professor of Chemical Engineering at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, (EPFL). He holds MSc degrees in Chemical Engineering and Physics from TU Delft and a PhD in Chemistry from Utrecht University. After a decade as a senior researcher at Shell, he became Professor of Computational Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam and later held joint appointments at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has served as Director of CECAM and is a Foreign Member of both the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW). His research integrates molecular simulations, artificial intelligence, and process design to accelerate the discovery of nanoporous materials for energy and environmental applications. He is a co-author of the widely used textbook Understanding Molecular Simulations.