Laura Ratcliff

Laura Ratcliff is a Lecturer in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol, as well as an Associate Professor at the Hylleraas Centre for Quantum Molecular Sciences at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. She obtained an MPhys in Theoretical Physics from the University of York (2008), which included an Erasmus year at L’Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille in France. She then undertook a PhD in the Department of Materials at Imperial College London (2012). She held postdoc positions at the Laboratory of Atomistic Simulation at CEA in Grenoble, France, followed by the Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory in the US. She returned to Imperial College early 2017, beginning an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship late 2017, before moving to the University of Bristol in 2022. Her research involves the development and application of new methods for first principles materials modelling, where she has contributed to various density functional theory codes – BigDFT, ONETEP, MADNESS and MRChem. Her interests lie in both the development of software for the efficient use of supercomputers and in applications to a diverse range of materials and properties.