The 2020 European Chemistry Gold Medal will be awarded to Professor Michele Parrinello for exceptional achievements in the field of chemistry in Europe. Professor Parrinello will be presented with the Gold Medal during the 8th EuChemS Chemistry Congress in Lisbon, Portugal. In addition, he will also give a plenary lecture during the ECC8.

Every two years, the exceptional achievements of one scientist working in the field of chemistry in Europe are rewarded. The winner receives a gold medal and the opportunity to give the opening lecture at the next European Chemistry Congress (ECC).

Professor Parrinello is an Italian physicist. He is currently Professor at the ETH Zurich and at the Università della Svizzera Italiana Lugano, in Switzerland. For his research, he has been awarded numerous prizes.  Among them can be listed the 2001 American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry and the 2017 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences. More recently, Professor Parrinello received the 2020 Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute) in Chemistry. Furthermore, Professor Parrinello is the author of more than 600 publications. He is also a member of several academies, including the British Royal Society, the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.

Professor Parrinello’s interests in Science are interdisciplinary. Together with Professor Car, he is still developing and applying the Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics method. This computational Chemistry software looks at the motion of individual atoms. This method has broad applications in physics and chemistry and allows scientists to understand atomic behavior in various range applications. Among them, the Car-Parrinello method helped studying the behavior of water near a hydrophobic graphene sheet, solving the heat transfer problems between Si/Ge superlattices, evaluating the critical point of aluminum and much more.