Zeila Zanolli is leading the “Quantum Materials by Design” group at the Chemistry Department/Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science, Utrecht University. Previously (2018 – 2020) she was a Ramon y Cajal Fellow at ICN2, Barcelona (Spain), an excellence program of the Spanish Ministry for Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO). In 2016 – 2018, she leaded the Nanospintronics Group at the Physics Dept of RWTH Aachen University, funded by the DFG. In 2015 – 2012 she was Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow at Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany).
Her researc focus is on Quantum Materials, a class of materials in which quantum mechanical effects are visible at the macroscopic scale. They provide unprecedented opportunities to enable a new technology based on quantum effects, with impact on low-dissipation electronics, photovoltaics, quantum information and, in general, quantum engineering. Her major contribution are in developing and using first-principles theory and computational methods to investigate topological materials, superconductors, quantum transport, (magnetic) proximity interaction, and spectroscopy. Her group is core developer of the open source code SIESTA https://gitlab.com/siesta-project/
She serves in the Psi-k working group “Quantum materials driven by correlations, topology or spin", in the Steering Committee of the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility (ETSF), and in the board of the “Semiconductor and Quantum Materials” session of the European Physical Society. Since 2019 Dr. Zanolli serves in the Editorial College of SciPost Physics, a Diamond Open Access publication portal. In 2018-20, Dr. Zanolli served in the Executive Committee of the MaX (MAterials design at the eXascale) European Centre of Excellence which enables materials modelling, simulations, discovery and design at the frontiers of the current and future High Performance Computing (HPC), High Throughput Computing (HTC) and data analytics technologies. In 2017 she has been elected Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe (YAE), a pan-European network of scientists active in science policy, where she served as a board member and treasurer in 2028-22.