Lorenzo Sponza, Ph.D.

Lorenzo Sponza was a member of the Real Materials Group at King’s College London, where he worked as a research associate with Professor Mark van Schilfgaarde, in collaboration with Professor Gabriel Kotliar of Rutgers University. He obtained his Ph.D. in the Theoretical Spectroscopy Group of the Laboratoire des Solides Irradiés (LSI), École Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France), under the supervision of Lucia Reining and Christine Giorgetti. He continued his scientific career as a research and teaching assistant at the Institut des NanoSciences de Paris (INSP) in the Oxides in Low Dimensions Group directed by Claudine Noguera and Jacek Goniakowski.

Sponza’s interests are principally in the ab initio description of the electronic structure of real materials, with particular interest in the spectra of two-particle excitations (e.g., absorption or electron energy loss). His current research focuses on the theoretical and technical development of methods merging the dynamical mean-field theory and the quasiparticle self-consistent GW (QSGW) approaches, with the aim of overcoming the limitations of both. In his earlier works, he focused mainly in many-body perturbation theory, either applying state-of-the-art methods to the prediction of optical spectra of systems interesting for technological applications or developing novel theoretical approaches to include dynamical effects in the description of light absorption.