Valerio Vitale obtained an equivalent First Class honours degree in Chemical Engineering at the University of Naples (Federico II) in the 2012. During his masters thesis he studied the structural and electronic properties of Au chains on the Ge(001) surface with canonical plane-waves DFT simulations. Following this he won a studentship for an integrated four-year PhD project at the Doctoral Training Center of the Institute for Complex Systems Simulation.
He is currently working on the development of novel methods for the calculation of the IR-spectra of (bio)molecules both in gas and condensed phase. within the ONETEP framework.
His long-term project concerns the implementation of new methods based on finite temperature DFT to extend the linear-scale behavior of ONETEP code to metallic systems.