Training

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 from academic year 2018-2019, Francesco is also invited professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin, to teach the course of Solid State Physics.

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.

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  • 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 ISTPC2017, which took place in Aussois, June 2017.

    Level of the students: PhD and post-docs (even more senior scientists).

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  • Spectroscopy Lectures. These schools take typically place at CECAM, 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, with the next one, taking place in Lausanne, October 2018.

    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

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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:

  • Creation of a platform to host e-learning content, including virtual classes, forum, automatic exercises. The platform is already built, it is freely accessible (under registration) here: https://evo.polytechnique.fr/moodle . Only few modules are present so far. More to come.
  • We are developing, in collaboration with the Ecole Polytechnique, a MOOC devoted to Density Functional Theory, to be put on Coursera.
  • We are building a workshop/school to spread knowledge and lower thresholds to start using online teaching methods and creating educational resources to that end. The approach will be practical and hands-on, such that participants develop a good view on what is possible for them, with their background and with the environment they operate in. We will advertise the workshop, in due course.

Building African Networks

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The group is also involved and actively participate 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. This year the school is organised in Ethiopia. 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 she is now a PhD student in Finland.