From CNR-Nano in Modena to POLIMA

Her research career began with the European Master’s programme in Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modelling at the University of Perugia and the Autonomous University of Madrid. She then pursued the international Ph.D in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Perugia under the supervision of Prof. Giacomo Giorgi. Her doctoral research focused on first-principles simulations based on density functional theory, applied to solid-state materials relevant to sustainable energy applications, including halide perovskites and low-dimensional halide materials. During this time, a collaboration with Prof. Ivano Castelli at DTU Energy brought her into contact with Danish institutions, where she applied ab-initio methods to the study of complex oxides. Following her PhD, she joined CNR-Nano in Modena, working with Dr. Daniele Varsano. Her research there expanded into excited-state properties and many-body perturbation theory, within GW approximation and the Bethe–Salpeter equation. At CNR-Nano, she was involved in the EuroHPC project HANAMI (a Europe–Japan collaboration) focusing on the computational design of sustainable materials for photovoltaics and energy storage, and on the development and optimisation of scalable materials-simulation softwares for modern HPC architectures.

Costanza has just joined POLIMA as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Dr. Line Jelver. Costanza first connected to the Danish research community during her PhD, while working with quantum-mechanical computational approaches to investigate groundstate properties of materials for sustainable energy solutions. Her research in POLIMA is carried out in the framework of the ADaM project, where she works on developing autonomous, LLM-assisted workflows for first-principles simulations of excited-state properties in solids.