Kristin Persson Receives Distinguished Scientist Fellow Award

Under Persson's directorship since 2011, the Materials Project has become the most widely used open-access repository of information on inorganic materials in the world. The database holds millions of properties on hundreds of thousands of crystalline structures and molecules, information primarily processed at Berkeley Lab's National Energy Research Science Computing Center. More than 500,000 people - many of whom include researchers who are developing new materials for high-performance batteries, fuel cells, photovoltaics, and data storage - are registered as users of the site and, on average, more than four papers citing the Materials Project are published every day.

She served as director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility at Berkeley Lab, between 2020 and 2024. During her tenure, she successfully steered the Foundry and its user community through the unpredictable challenges of a global pandemic by overseeing new programs enabling greater interactions with researchers who could not easily travel to Berkeley during lockdown, among other notable achievements. The Molecular Foundry is one of five DOE national user facilities for nanoscale science and serves over a thousand academic, industrial, and government scientists from around the world each year.

Before joining Berkeley Lab in 2008 as a research chemist, Persson worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after earning her doctorate in theoretical physics from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Persson is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades, and has published hundreds of scientific papers. She has been named a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. In February this year, she was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Physical Society, and the Materials Research Society. In 2023 she was awarded the Cyril Stanley Smith Award by the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. She has received the Secretary of Energy's Achievement Award twice, and in 2013 she accepted the Berkeley Lab Director's Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.

The Molecular Foundry and the National Energy Research Science Computing Center are user facilities at Berkeley Lab.

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