The teaching activity of the group is very varied and span over different levels, targeted students, places, and modality. The majority of teaching is devoted to theoretical spectroscopy (but not exclusively), both from the theoretical and numerical implementations point of view. Hands-on with the codes are often part of the training offer, being this on site at Polytechnique, on demand, or in one of our thematic schools.
We can divide our training offer in different levels.
University courses
We are not University professors, so we do not have recurrent teaching duties in Bachelor or Master programme. However, since 2017, Francesco holds a course of Advanced Solid State Physics at Diderot University, in Paris, in the Master "Quantum Devices".
Level of the students: Master level. Starting 2024-2025
Thematic schools
The group is heavily involved in the organisation (and tutoring) of many thematic schools, that take place all over the world, in particular at CECAM.
We participate as teachers and tutors in many schools devoted to Green's functions theory, (TD)DFT, software developement, quantum chemistry approaches, etc. Here, we report a short selection.
Theoretical schools. In these kind of schools, that have a duration of 2 weeks, an ample panorama of theoretical approaches is involved, in which both the solid state physicist and the quantum chemist approaches are taken into account. The teaching involved spans from Hartree-Fock to Bethe-Salpeter, from Quantum Monte-Carlo to Time Dependent DFT. An example of these schools is the ISTPC2024, which took place in Aussois, June 2024.Level of the students: PhD and post-docs (even more senior scientists).
Spectroscopy Lectures.
These schools take typically place at CECAM (except in 2012 and 2014 when they took place in Palaiseau), last for 5 days, and alternate theoretical aspects of the theory (TDDFT, GW, BSE), with hands-on on the codes. This is an ongoing series of schools, the last one being in 2024. Level of the students: from Master to young post-docs.
Software schools. Our group is heavily involved in code development, however software illiteracy is currently widely present among scientists, including young researchers. We therefore regularly organizes schools to improve programming style, to work in collaboration, to be updated with today cutting-edge computational infrastructure. The last of these schools took place in Lausanne, March 2017.
Level of the students: from Master to young post-docs.
Digital Learning
It is no mystery that today and tomorrow teaching is going to explore some forms of digital and blended approaches. We believe we can do a lot as researchers and teaching community, about online teaching for electronic structure theory. We have therefore started a new digital learning project, that will operate in various stages:
We have developed, with the crucial help of the Ecole Polytechnique, a MOOC devoted to Density Functional Theory. It covers the basic theory of DFT, from the demonstration of the main theorems to the description of functionals and approximations; from a historical overview to the algoritmic point of view. The course is self-contained, no previous knowledge of electronic structure theory is required. The MOOC is completed by quizzes and exercises, and it is freely available on the Coursera Platform. - We have built a hands-on workshop on online and blended teaching, one that addresses the needs of the post-Covid era. There are plenty of reasons to keep elements of teaching in an online form permanently. How can we learn from the
past year? How can we offer our online and blended teaching in a way that leads to better learning and increased student satisfaction? And what are the pitfalls we must avoid? We’ve set ourselves the challenge to bring this information to you in an online format that will keep you engaged and motivated.
Building African Networks
The group is also involved and actively participates to the ASESMA project, African School on Electronic Structure Methods and
Applications. The main scope is to build an African network for computational materials and biological sciences. Matteo (and this year also Lucia) actively participate at the African schools on electronic structure methods and applications. In 2023 the school was organised in Kigali, Rwanda. We strongly believe in the usefulness of this project: Azima was a student in ASESMA2016, came after the school to Palaiseau for a three-months visit with Matteo and then she went to Finland for her PhD and is now a Post-doc in Aalto.
Training for experimentalists
In the past, we also organised several events for our experimentalist colleagues. The main scope of these introductory training days is to provide attendees with both the theoretical foundations and the knowledge about ab initio calculations, in order to facilitate discussions and collaborations between experimentalists and theoreticians.
- SOLEIL Theory Day Synchrotron Soleil (France) [6 May 2014]
- Second ETSF Training Day on Theoretical Spectrocopy Palaiseau (France) [22 Octobre 2010]
- ETSF Training Day on Theoretical Spectrocopy Palaiseau (France) [19 November 2009]