12 September 2024

Hans G. A. Hellmann Prize for MCQST scientist Christian Schilling

On 4th September, Christian Schilling has been awarded the Hans G. A. Hellmann Prize 2024 at the 60th Symposium on Theoretical Chemistry by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Theoretischen Chemie (AGTC), the organization of theoretical chemists in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.

The prize is awarded as recognition for outstanding scientific achievements in the entire field of theoretical chemistry to young scientists (usually under 40), who do not yet hold a lifetime professorship and who are connected to the German-speaking research landscape.

This award recognizes Christian Schilling’s “outstanding scientific contributions on the geometry of reduced density matrices and the N-representability problem”. For instance, he contributed to the foundation of functional theories, generalized the ensemble density functional theory by Gross, Oliveira and Kohn to strongly correlated electron systems, and translated crucial quantum information theoretical concepts to the context of identical particle systems in quantum chemistry. The latter led to a refinement of electronic structure theory with applications in the development of classical and quantum computational methods for strongly correlated electron systems.

"I am deeply grateful for this award which recognizes all my hard work over the years. It also highlights the significance of quantum information theoretical tools for quantum chemistry and quantum many-body physics." mentiones the scientist.

Christian Schilling studied Physics at the University of Mainz and obtained a PhD at ETH Zurich in 2014. During 2014-2019, he was working at the University of Oxford, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Oxford Martin School and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. He also won a prestigious Junior Research Fellowship at Worcester College in 2016 and a Senior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College in 2018. Since 2019 he is leading an Emmy-Noether group at the Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics (ASC) and LMU München, and since 2023 he is heading the cross-consortium on Quantum Algorithm within the Munich Quantum Valley.

Source: ASC website