Roberto Car, professor in the Chemistry Department at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA, will lecture on “Melting transition in elemental materials from ab-initio molecular dynamics” in the Main Building Seminar Room, on Wednesday, 13 July. Car, while a staff scientist at SISSA in the 1980s, developed the ab-initio molecular dynamics method along with his colleague Michele Parrinello. The method became one of the foremost tools in electronic structure calculations for solids, liquids and molecules.