Lectures and Outreach

CQIQC Seminar July 16, 2024 Speaker: Barak Hirshberg, Tel Aviv University

Dr. Barak Hirshberg, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Tel Aviv University, on "A Hitchhiker’s Guide to an Academic Career". The talk was given in the Adams Conference 2025, for more information about the Fellowship Program visit: https://adams.academy.ac.il Barak Hirshberg has been an Assistant Professor at the School of Chemistry, at Tel Aviv University, since January 2021. Previously, he was a Rothschild postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Michele Parrinello at ETH Zurich. He obtained his PhD as an Adams Fellow of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities with Prof. R. Benny Gerber at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Some of his recognitions include the Israel Chemical Society Prize for an Excellent Graduate Student and the Lise Meitner-Minerva Center Junior Award for an outstanding paper in computational quantum chemistry. Most recently, he won the Journal of Chemical Physics Best Paper by Emerging Investigator Award and was the inaugural awardee of the Rector’s Prize for Innovation and Creativity in Teaching at Tel Aviv University. The Hirshberg lab develops computer simulations to understand the static and dynamic properties of quantum and classical condensed phase systems, focusing on molecular materials. They design algorithms to overcome the fundamental limitations of standard methods: 1) extending them to much longer timescales, 2) describing bosonic and fermionic exchange at finite temperatures, and 3) simulating many-body quantum dynamics. These tools are used to investigate phenomena such as quantum phase transitions, molecular crystal polymorphism, and biomolecular conformational dynamics. #AcademicCareer #HitchhikersGuide #AdamsConference #AdamsFellowship