Last week I started my new position as a postdoctoral fellow at the MATHERIALS team of the Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherche en Mathématiques et Calcul Scientifique (CERMICS) laboratory and Inria Paris with an additional affiliation to the Institut des Sciences du Calcul et des Données at Sorbonne Université. As can already be guessed from the names of the aforementioned labs, each cover research topics in an interdisciplinary research field. At CERMICS, for example, applied mathematicians are working on topics related to the molecular sciences, optimisation or finance.

Along this line my new direction of research stays interdisciplinary as well: Using the programming language julia we would like to provide a highly modular and flexible plane-wave density-functional theory code for the modelling of solid-state materials. The main aim of the project is to allow for novel mathematical approaches in this context to be readily implemented and tested on a scale going beyond simple toy problems. In order to achieve this, the code needs to stay simple and accessible, but still perform decently --- a challenge, which can in our opinion be tackled rather well using julia and its rapidly-growing number of modules. As mentioned previously I like the modern concepts of the julia language very much and thus I am eager about this opportunity to try it for coding a complete framework for modelling a scientific problem.

Right now I know rather little about the topic of modelling solid-state materials, but fortunately I am not alone on this project. Rather I will be working jointly with Antoine Levitt, Eric Cancès, Laura Grigori and Eleonora Luppi from either CERMICS, Inria or Sorbonne Université on this project.