Stefan Goedecker studied physics at the Technical University Munich and the College of William and Marry. Afterwards he obtained his Ph.D. from EPFL Lausanne. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell university and the Max-Planck Institute in Stuttgart. He then worked in the fundamental condensed matter research department of the CEA Grenoble before being appointed in 2003 full professor of Physics at the university of Basel.

Due to the availability of high speed computers, simulation methods are nowadays a powerful tool to determine the structure and electronic properties of condensed matter systems. We develop new algorithms for electronic structure calculations and atomistic simulations and apply them to problems in physics, nanosciences and biology. The research has interdisciplinary character, involving physics, mathematics, chemistry and computer science.

(A complete list of publications can be found here or on Google scholar)

• Global Minimum Determination of the Born-Oppenheimer Surface within Density Functional Theory
  S. Goedecker, W. Hellmann and T. Lenosky
  Phys Rev. Lett. 95, 055501 (2005)
   
• O(N) methods for electronic structure calculations
  S. Goedecker
  Rev. of Mod. Phys. 71, 1085-1123 (1999)
   
• Natural orbital functional for the many electron problem
  S. Goedecker and C. Umrigar
  Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 866 (1998)
   
• Separable dual space Gaussian Pseudopotentials
  S. Goedecker, M. Teter and J. Hutter
  Phys. Rev. B 54, 1703 (1996)
   
• Performance Optimization of Numerically Intensive Codes
  S. Goedecker and A. Hoisie
  SIAM publishing company, Philadelphia, USA, 2001 (ISBN 0-89871-484-2)