UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Chemistry Department Prof. Giulia Galli has been named the 2024-2025 Joseph O. Hirschfelder Awardee.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Theoretical Chemistry Institute awards the yearly prize for exceptional work in the field of theoretical chemistry. Four Nobel Prize recipients are among the Hirschfelder Prize honorees.
“We are delighted to add Professor Galli to this distinguished group of award winners,” said TCI Director Prof. Xuhui Huang.
“Giulia has made significant contributions to theoretical chemistry by developing advanced theoretical and computational methods for materials and molecules from first principles,” he said. “Her methods have been widely applied to predict and design the structural, electronic, and optical properties of materials.”
The honor was particularly special as Galli considers Hirschfelder’s textbook “The Molecular Theory of Gases and Liquids” as one of the books that “really made a difference” during her PhD work at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy.
“I still remember the dark green hard cover of the copy I was checking out at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) library in Trieste, when I was a student,” she said. “I was completely taken by surprise by the Hirschfelder award, and I did not know I had been considered for it. I am honored to have been selected and I share this honor with the many students and postdocs who made it possible for me to be where I am today.”
She also credited her many experimental collaborators, in particular Prof. Kyoung-Shin Choi at UW Madison and Prof. David Awschalom at PME. “Experimental collaborations have been absolutely critical to the success of my activity,” Galli said.
In addition to serving as the Liew Family Professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations at UChicago PME and the Chemistry Department, Galli also holds a senior scientist position at Argonne National Laboratory, where she is a group leader and the director of the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials.
The Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize in Theoretical Chemistry, established in 1991, commemorates the life’s work of Prof. Hischfelder as a pioneering member of the theoretical chemistry field. Prof. Hirschfelder had an esteemed career in education, research, and public service at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for over 40 years.