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Stefaan Cottenier is a professor at the materials science division of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of Gent University, and member of the Center for Molecular Modeling. His research activities are on the application of quantum physics simulation tools to predict properties of crystals that are difficult, expensive or dangerous to measure by experimental methods. Most of his projects are in close collaboration with experimental or industrial partners, in areas as condensed matter physics, planetology, semiconductor manufacturing and metallurgy. Communicating with experimental researchers inevitably brings up time and again the topic of the reliability of the computational methods used. This is how the verification and validation of DFT methods and codes became a topic in his research projects. Stefaan Cottenier collected a bottom-up consortium of 69 researchers from the DFT community, who ran together the same standardized benchmark calculations for 40 different DFT methods and codes. Up to today, this is the most stringent test for the reproducibility of DFT predictions.