This Handbook contains a set of articles introducing the modeling and simulation of materials from the standpoint of basic methods and studies. The intent is to provide a compendium that is foundational to an emerging ?eld of computational research, a new discipline that may now be called Compu- tional Materials. This area has become suf?ciently diverse that any attempt to cover all the pertinent topics would be futile. Even with a limited scope, the present undertaking has required the dedicated efforts of 13 Subject Editors to set the scope of nine chapters, solicit authors, and collect the manuscripts. The contributors were asked to target students and non-specialists as the primary audience, to provide an accessible entry into the ?eld, and to offer references for further reading. With no precedents to follow, the editors and authors were only guided by a common goal -to produce a volume that would set a standard toward de?ning the broad community and stimulating its growth. The idea of a reference work on materials modeling surfaced in conver- tions with Peter Bin?eld, then the Reference Works Editor at Kluwer Academic Publishers, in the spring of 1999. The rationale at the time already seemed quite clear - the ?eld of computational materials research was t- ing off, powerful computer capabilities were becoming increasingly available, and many sectors of the scienti?c community were getting involved in the enterprise.
About the Author:

Wanda Andreoni is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL). She has been involved in Computational Materials Science since the early days of her research activity, in both academic and industrial institutions, covering also teaching, organizational, and research managing positions. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She was Zernike Professor at the Groningen University (NL) (2011) and CECAM Director (2009-2012). Regarding editorial work, she was Coeditor of Europhysics Letters (1990-1993) and Editor of The Chemical Physics of Fullerenes 10 (and 5) Years Later, NATO ASI Series E: Applied Sciences, Vol. 316 (Kluwer, 1996), and of The Physics of Fullerene-Based and Fullerene-Related Materials, Series on the Physics and Chemistry of Materials with Low-Dimensional Structures, Vol. 23 (Kluwer, 2000).

Sidney Yip immigrated to the USA from China in 1950 at age 14. After receiving degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Nuclear Engineering from the University of Michigan and spending two postdoctoral years at Cornell University, he joined the Nuclear Engineering Faculty at MIT in 1965. From early research in theoretical studies of particle and fluid transport, he became broadly involved in atomistic modeling and simulation of materials. He edited the first edition of the Handbook of Materials Modeling as well as Spectroscopy in Biology and Chemistry: Neutron, X-Ray, Laser (1974) and Materials Interfaces: Atomic-Level Structure and Properties (1993). Other books include the monographs, Foundations of Neutron Transport Theory (1967), Neutron Molecular Spectroscopy (1968), and Molecular Hydrodynamics (1980), and a text, Nuclear Radiation Interactions (2014). He received Guggenheim Fellowship, US Senior Scientist Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Distinguished Alumnus Award of the University of Michigan, and the Robert Cahn Award. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, he became Professor Emeritus in 2009.