Massimiliano Stengel graduated in Physics at the University of Trieste (1999) and received his PhD in Science from the Swiss Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL) in 2004. From February 2005 to April 2009 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Nicola Spaldin at the Materials Department (UC Santa Barbara), and from May to September 2009 at CECAM (EPFL) under the supervision of Prof. Wanda Andreoni. From February 2010 to September 2011 he worked at ICMAB in Barcelona as a "Ramón y Cajal" fellow, before joining ICREA as a Research Professor in October 2011.

My research develops and uses frontier electronic-structure methods to tackle key fundamental and technological questions in condensed-matter physics and materials science. I am especially interested in phenomena where the established first-principles approaches are either nonexistent or inadequate, and to devising efficient computational methods to overcome the existing limitations. In the past few years I have pursued the fundamental understanding of spatial dispersion effects, ranging from flexoelectricity to natural optical activity. I also have a keen interest in phonons, and in their dynamical interaction with other degrees of freedom (e.g., magnetism or external fields).