Alexandre Tkatchenko is a Professor of Theoretical Chemical Physics at the University of Luxembourg. He obtained his bachelor degree in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. In 2008−2010, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. Between 2011 and 2016, he led an independent research group at the same institute. Tkatchenko has given more than 230 invited talks, seminars and colloquia worldwide, published more than 150 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals (h-index=58), and serves on the editorial boards of Physical Review Letters (APS) and Science Advances (AAAS). He received a number of awards, including elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2019, the 2020 Dirac Medal from the World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists, the 2011 Gerhard Ertl Young Investigator Award of the German Physical Society, and two flagship grants from the European Research Council: a Starting Grant in 2011 and a Consolidator Grant in 2017. His group pushes the boundaries of quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and machine learning to develop efficient methods to enable accurate modeling and new insights into complex materials.
Leonardo Medrano worked as a postdoc in Prof. A. Tkatchenko’s group at the University of Luxembourg from 2019 until 2024. He is interested in combining machine learning methods with quantum/statistical mechanics to develop physics-inspired neural network potentials for the study of drug-protein interactions as well as frameworks for computer-aided molecular design. In 2018, Leonardo got his doctor degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Dresden as an IMPRS fellow (International Max Planck Research School). Earlier, he got his Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Physics at the National University of San Marcos in Lima-Peru. In addition to his theoretical investigations, Leonardo actively engages in multi-disciplinary projects with experimental/industrial collaborators to address current challenges in Physics and Chemistry (see Google Scholar page). Since mid-2024, he is an associate researcher at the Technical University of Dresden.