2026 - Page 2

Doctoral candidate Simon Elias Schrader at the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, successfully defended his thesis "Rothe’s method with Gaussians for quantum dynamics" for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor on 10 April 2026.

The MRChem group obtained compute time funding through two EuroHPC Benchmark Access Calls for benchmarking their software MRChem on EuroHPC machines.

In April 2026, Dr. Thomas Sandberg from Åbo Akademi University in Finland will visit the Hylleraas Centre to collaborate with researcher Erik Tellgren.

PhD student Michael Augello received a UiO:Energy Mobility Grant for a PhD exchange of 3 months in Belgium

We’re pleased to welcome Jordan Rio, who has joined the Hylleraas Centre in Oslo as a postdoc researcher. He will be working on the speciation and activation of transition-metal pre-catalysts in solution.

Doctoral candidate Mohamed Eid Ahmed Safy at the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, is defending the thesis "Computationally guided CO2 to methanol catalysis: From a mechanistic investigation to a descriptor-based screening" for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor.

Researcher Henrique Musseli Cezar granted 10 MNOK for his Early Career FRIPRO project "APExModel: Addressing Antimicrobial Peptides by Integrating Experiments into Modelling”. The APExModel project aims to address the global challenge of antimicrobial resistance by focusing on antimicrobial peptides (AMPs).

The CCSC 2026: Chemical Compound Space Conference aims to cultivate and strengthen a global scholarly network by convening experts, mid-career professionals, and emerging scientists to advance and refine Quantum Machine Learning (QML) through the exploration and utilization of chemical compound space.

In collaboration with researchers from the University of São Paulo (Brazil), Hylleraas Centre's researcher Henrique Musseli Cezar has published a new study in ACS Omega; Effects of van der Waals Interaction on N₂ Adsorption on Carbon Nanotubes: Proposal for New Force Field Parameters. The research investigates the interactions between nitrogen gas and carbon nanotubes, proposing new force field parameters to improve the accuracy of molecular simulations for gas separation.

Master student Francesco Rumiz in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry from the University of Trieste, has a three months research stay at Hylleraas Centre, Oslo. During his stay he will be supervised by researcher Andre Laestadius.

Three visitors from the Scientific computing group at Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France visited the Hylleraas Centre in Oslo to continue our ongoing collaboration on the development and application of the Hylleraas Software Platform (HSP).

Kankana Bhattacharjee from Ashoka University has a two months stay at Hylleraas Centre, node Oslo. During her stay, Kankana will will focus on coarse grained simulation of lipid membranes and mechanism of diffusion of lipophilic drugs through them. 

Prof. Michele Cascella gave an invited lecture with title: “Grignard Chemistry Revisited: a Multi-scale Perspective”, presenting longstanding work on main-group organometallic reactivity in collaboration with Prof. Odile Eisenstein.

Aurore Denjean, David Balcells, and Ainara Nova published this study on Journal of Materials Chemistry A, where it has been highlighted as a HOT Paper

Hylleraas and OsloMet researchers have devised a new framework for reconstructing effective Kohn-Sham potentials from densities in periodic systems. By using Moreau-Yosida regularisation, the inversion becomes much more stable against small perturbations and is easier to handle numerically. We demonstrate the approach by recovering local Kohn-Sham and local exact-exchange potentials for a one-dimensional periodic Hartree-Fock model.

The research investigates how "frustrated" amphiphiles — molecules designed with alternating water-attracting and water-repelling parts, self-assemble into complex structures in solution.

PhD-student Matteo Orlandi from the Chemistry Department "Ugo Schiff" of the University of Florence, has a four months research stay at Hylleraas Centre, Oslo. He is a theoretical and Computational Chemist. During his stay he will be supervised by Professor Michele Cascella.

 A molecular dynamics study with machine learning potentials. The influence of the organic residue and the solvent in the Schlenk equilibrium for Grignard reagents in THF.In this paper we study the behaviour of different Grignard reagents in organic solution with a newly developed machine learning interatomic potential.

Mohamed Safy, David Balcells, and Ainara Nova, in collaboration with the Beller group at the LIKAT, published a paper in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. The article was featured as a Reduction of CO₂ HOT Paper.

Doctoral candidate Håkon R. Fredheim at the Department of Chemistry, defended his thesis "A Mathematical Analysis of Coupled Cluster Theory and Density Functional Theory" for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor.

Senior researcher David Balcells tested whether general language models can act as research collaborators in a “co-intelligent design” approach, finding that they can produce coherent plans though they sometimes omit key technical details.

We’re pleased to welcome Ning Cao, who has joined the Hylleraas Centre in Oslo as a Research Fellow. He will be working under the supervision of Abril Castro in her research group.

In a recently published paper, Alberto Guerrero and Abril Castro in collaboration with distinguished universities in Mexico, explore the chemistry of noble-gas compounds, revealing that xenon can form energetically stable and potentially covalent bonds with a broad range of icosagens.