Under Persson’s leadership since 2011, the Materials Project has become the world’s most widely used open-access repository of information on inorganic materials. The database contains millions of properties on hundreds of thousands of crystalline structures and molecules. This information is processed primarily at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Science Computing Center. More than 500,000 people – including many researchers developing new materials for high-performance batteries, fuel cells, photovoltaics, and data storage – are registered as users of the site, and on average more than four articles citing the Materials Project are published each day.
From 2020 to 2024, she served as director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility at Berkeley Lab. During her tenure, she successfully steered the Foundry and its user community through the unpredictable challenges of a global pandemic, including overseeing new programs that enabled greater interaction with researchers who could not easily travel to Berkeley during lockdown. The Molecular Foundry is one of five DOE national user facilities for nanoscience and serves over a thousand academic, industry, and government scientists from around the world each year.
Before joining Berkeley Lab as a research chemist in 2008, Persson worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after completing her doctorate in theoretical physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Persson has received numerous awards and honors and published hundreds of scientific papers. She was named a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. In February this year, she was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. She is also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society. In 2023, she was awarded the Cyril Stanley Smith Award by the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. She has twice received the Secretary of Energy’s Achievement Award and in 2013 the Berkeley Lab Director’s Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
The Molecular Foundry and the National Energy Research Science Computing Center are user facilities at Berkeley Lab.
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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is dedicated to finding solutions for humanity through research in clean energy, a healthy planet, and discovery science. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab was founded on the belief that the biggest problems are best solved as a team. Its scientists have been awarded 16 Nobel Prizes, and researchers from around the world rely on the Lab’s world-class scientific facilities to conduct their own groundbreaking research. Berkeley Lab is a multi-program national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to solve some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.
