Anatole Von Lilienfeld
Professor, Department of Chemistry and Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
Anatole von Lilienfeld’s appointment at U of T is shared between the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Materials Science & Engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. He is also affiliated with the Department of Physics and a Trinity College Fellow.
Von Lilienfeld was recently appointed CIFAR AI chair and has been the inaugural Clark Chair in Advanced Materials at the Vector Institute and at University of Toronto since 2022 and was a full professor for Computational Materials Discovery at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna.
From 2013–20, he held associate and assistant professorship positions at the University of Basel, and the Free University of Brussels. Until 2013, he worked as an assistant computational scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory’s Leadership Computing Facility.
In spring 2011, he chaired the three-month program, “Navigating Chemical Compound Space for Materials and Bio Design” at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA. From 2007 to 2010 he was a Distinguished Harry S. Truman Fellow at Sandia National Laboratories.
He carried out postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (2007) and at New York University (2006). He received a PhD in computational chemistry from EPF Lausanne in 2005. He performed his diploma thesis work within an Erasmus exchange program at ETH Zürich and the University of Cambridge. He studied chemistry as an undergraduate at ETH Zürich, the École de Chimie, Polymères, et Matériaux in Strasbourg, and at the University of Leipzig.
Von Lilienfeld is an associate editor of the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, and an editorial board member of Kim Reviews. He has served as founding editor for Machine Learning: Science and Technology, as associate editor for Science Advances, and as an editorial board member for Scientific Data.
He serves on the advisory board of SIMPLAIX (KIT, University of Heidelberg, HIT) and of the DOE Frontier Research Center CD4DC (led by University of Chicago). Von Lilienfeld is the recipient of the Löwdin Lecturer Award 2021, the Feynman Theory Prize 2018, the Woodward Lecturer Award 2016, and the Thomas-Kuhn-Paradigm Shift Award 2013. Von Lilienfeld also received an ERC Consolidator grant on Quantum Machine Learning (2017), and a Swiss National Science Professorship Award (2013).