Roberto Car Named a Clarivate Citation Laureate
Roberto Car, the *31 Dornte Professor in Chemistry and the Princeton Materials Institute, has been named a 2024 Citation Laureate in Chemistry by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) at Clarivate.
Car is among 22 Citation Laureates announced this week across four categories: chemistry, physiology or medicine, physics, and economics. He was named together with his longtime research partner, the physicist Michele Parrinello of ETH Zurich.
The pair are receiving recognition for the Car-Parrinello method for calculating ab initio molecular dynamics. In their press materials, the ISI called the method “a revolution in computational chemistry.”
The ISI uses data from the Web of Science citation index to identify world-class researchers whose work has been highly cited. This data “signals what the global scientific community regards as groundbreaking, and of the utmost importance,” said the ISI.
Roberto Car, the *31 Dornte Professor in Chemistry and the Princeton Materials Institute, and director of the DOE chemical science center Chemistry in Solution and at Interfaces.
This year’s Citation Laureates have made significant contributions to advancing key areas, including clean energy, nanotechnology, 3D protein structures, the economic impact of corruption, heart disease, molecular dynamics, quantum computing, genetic imprinting and condensed matter physics.
Janet Currie, the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, was also named for her pioneering economic analysis of child development.
Car describes ab initio molecular dynamics as a computational technique that uses the laws of quantum mechanics to simulate and map interactions of large numbers of atoms in motion in a system. It is an invaluable tool for scientific discovery, providing scientists with a greater understanding of how matter behaves on the atomic scale.
It has often been called a virtual telescope for observing atomic movement.
Ab initio (Latin for “from the beginning”) molecular dynamics has been broadly used to describe and design diverse chemicals and materials, and to understand biological systems.
“Our work essentially initiated the field of ab initio molecular dynamics, which is now used by many people and is a standard technique for anyone who does calculations on systems, mostly in condensed phase but also with molecules,” said Car. “It is based on the forces that derive from the ground state of the electrons, so it’s more predictive than those that are typically used in molecular dynamic simulations.”
The method was introduced in 1985 in a groundbreaking paper in Physical Review Letters. Over the years, it has received many awards and commendations including most recently the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry (named in 2020 and awarded in 2021). Car was named a lifetime fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022.
A member of the Princeton Chemistry faculty since 1999, Car also directs the Department of Energy computational chemical science center Chemistry in Solution and at Interfaces.