The Veni grants are part of the Talent Scheme of NWO and are aimed at excellent researchers who have recently obtained their doctorate. The grants of up to € 320,000 confirm the quality and innovative nature of their research and help to further establish themselves in their field over a three-year period.

Dr Alberto Pérez de Alba Ortíz is an assistant professor in Computational Soft Matter, affiliated both to the van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences and the Informatics Institute. He is also a project leader in the recently established Research Priority Area ‘AI for Sustainable Molecules and Materials’ of the UvA Faculty of Science.

Alberto Pérez de Alba Ortíz studied Engineering Physics at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, where he also worked for the cement and steel industry. He later moved to TU München, supported by a personal scholarship, to study an MSc in Computational Science and Engineering. For his thesis, he worked on adaptive quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) simulations of proton transfers and Bayesian inference of reaction coordinates in the group of Prof. Karsten Reuter. In parallel, he was a research assistant in the group of Prof. Martin Zacharias, developing enhanced sampling methods for biomolecular transitions. Supported by a personal fellowship, he then pursued his PhD in the group of Dr Bernd Ensing in the Computational Chemistry at the Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences. His research focused on developing and applying advanced methods to understand complex chemical and conformational processes in biomolecules such as polysaccharides, peptides and DNA. Additionally, he worked on machine learning approaches to discover optimal descriptors for molecular transitions. He visited the group of Prof. Carme Rovira at Universitat de Barcelona with a personal grant from HPC-Europa3 to work on QM/MM simulations of light-sensing proteins. In 2021, he received his PhD cum laude and joined the Soft Condensed Matter group of Prof. Marjolein Dijkstra at Utrecht University, where he worked on bottom-up design of self-assembly in soft and porous materials at colloidal scales. In 2023, Pérez de Alba Ortíz was appointed as assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, affiliated both with the van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences and the Informatics Institute at the Faculty of Science.

See also

• From algorithmic criminal justice to depressive gut bacteria: 174 researchers receive Veni grant
• Research page Alberto Pérez de Alba Ortíz at the Computational Chemistry Group
• Research Priority Area AI for Sustainable Molecules and Materials