The 16th edition of the MaP Graduate Symposium took place on 14 & 15 June 2021. The D-​MATL was again successfully represented this year, with several high-​class talks and poster presentations. Many of the awards went to members of D-​MATL.

Chiara Gattinoni, a materials theorist and Marie Curie Fellow at ETH Zurich, uses the “Piz Daint” supercomputer at CSCS to investigate a special class of materials: ferroelectrics. In the future, these materials could constitute the heart of low-​energy-consuming, miniaturised data storage in electrical devices. One ferroelectric Gattinoni analysed is, according to her, truly magical.

In their latest work published on Soft Matter, researchers from the Soft and Living Materials group have shown how to produce synthetic structural color in one step thanks to phase-​separation in the solid state.

Can Onur Avci, Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona, Spain, receives the Prize for outstanding contributions to understand current-induced spin-orbit torques and electrical control of the magnetization in magnetic insulators, and for the discovery of unidirectional spin Hall magnetoresistance.