CEC AM – the Simulation and Modellingof Atoms and Molecules in Europe

Professor Dominic TILDESLEY
Director of CECAM

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Abstract : CECAM (Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire) was founded in Paris in 1969 by Dr Carl Moser. It is an organization devoted to the promotion of fundamental research on advanced computational methods and to their application to important problems in frontier areas of science and technology. As the name suggests, the traditional focus of CECAM has been atomistic and molecular simulations, applied to the physics and chemistry of condensed matter. Over the last twenty years, powerful advances in computer hardware and software have supported the extension of these methods to a wide range of problems in materials science, biology and medicinal chemistry.

CECAM has always been very attentive to such developments and has helped to foster many of them to the point that computer simulation is now considered to be a third way of doing science; a new way of linking theory and experiment. Thus the importance of simulation continues to grow in many emerging areas and CECAM is evolving its scope and structure to address these changes. For example, our communities are particularly interested in multiscale modelling of phenomena from a quantum to a constitutive equation description and we also recognize the importance of new statistical techniques that can extract relationships directly from data. To cover this broad range of activities we have established 17 CECAM nodes across Europe to work along side the headquarters in Lausanne.

We will describe he work of CECAM in the past three years with special reference to developments in the new CECAM nodes. At the same time we will point to future areas that CECAM would like to develop in 2014 and 2015 programmes and illustrate this with reference to work on the multiscale modelling of lubrication.

Biography : Dominic Tildesley received his DPhil from Oxford in 1976. Following post-doctoral studies at Cornell and Pennsylvania State University, he joined the Chemistry Department at Southampton University , UK  in 1981. He moved to take the Chair of Theoretical Chemistry at Imperial College in 1996.

In 1998 Dominic joined Unilever Research Port Sunlight as the Head of the Physical Sciences Group. In 2003 became Chief Scientist for Unilever’s Home and Personal Care Division. He retired from Unilever in June 2012.

He is currently director of CECAM (Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire) in Lausanne in Switzerland. He is currently professor titulaire at the EPFL in Switzerland.

Dominic has been Chair of the High Performance Computing initiative (HPCI) of the EPSRC. He co-chairs the UK -infrastructure Leadership team (with Rt Hon David Willets MP, Minister of Science).