Persson most recently served as Director of the Molecular Foundry. She created and is current director of the Materials Project, a multi-national effort to compute the properties of all inorganic materials and provide the data and associated analysis algorithms free of charge. Started in 2011, today the site has more than 500,000 users and registers an additional 300 daily.

The ultimate goal of the Materials Project is to drastically reduce the time needed to invent new materials to serve societal needs, in particular advancing clean energy solutions.

Persson’s lab leverages the software and data infrastructure of the Materials Project with expertise in materials informatics to study the physics and chemistry of materials, particularly for energy production and storage.

Before joining Berkeley Lab in 2008 as a research chemist, Persson worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after earning her doctorate in theoretical physics from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Persson is the recipient of numerous accolades, has published hundreds of scientific papers, and is a highly cited researcher. She is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the Materials Research Society. In 2023 she was awarded the Cyril Stanley Smith Award and has received the Secretary of Energy’s Achievement Award twice. In 2013 she accepted the Berkeley Lab Director’s Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. Persson is the Daniel M. Tellep Distinguished  Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.