Nicola Spaldin
Nicola Spaldin | |
|---|---|
| Born | Nicola Ann Spaldin Template:Birth year and age Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England |
| Occupation | Professor of materials science |
| Years active | 1996–present |
| Known for | Contributions to the field of multiferroics |
Nicola Ann Spaldin (born 1969)[1][2] FRS serves as a professor specializing in materials science at ETH Zurich, acclaimed for her groundbreaking contributions to the field of multiferroics.[3][4][5][6][7][8]
Education and early life
Born in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England, Spaldin completed her undergraduate studies in natural sciences at the University of Cambridge in 1991, followed by earning a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996.
Career and research
During her postdoctoral tenure at Yale University from 1996 to 1997, Spaldin developed an interest in multiferroics—materials exhibiting both magnetic and ferroelectric properties. While serving on the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she authored a pivotal 2000 publication that clarified the scarcity of known multiferroic materials. Building upon her theoretical insights, she contributed to the first experimental verification of multiferroic behavior in bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3) in 2003.
Her investigations propelled advancements in controlling magnetism via electric fields within BiFeO3, an achievement highlighted by Science magazine in 2007. This research also uncovered conductive ferroelectric domain walls and strain-induced morphotropic phase boundaries in BiFeO3. Additionally, she discovered novel origins of multiferroicity, including improper geometric ferroelectricity observed in YMnO3. Parallel to these efforts, Spaldin innovated computational techniques for incorporating finite electric and magnetic fields into density functional theory, addressing challenges such as the dielectric dead layer effect in capacitors and unveiling new magnetoelectric coupling mechanisms.
In 2010, Spaldin transitioned to ETH Zurich, where her research concentrated on three principal themes: extending magnetic multipole theory beyond dipolar approximations to elucidate magnetoelectric interactions and surface magnetism in antiferromagnets; formulating Dynamical Multiferroicity, which stimulated exploration into chiral phonons possessing magnetic moments; and leveraging multiferroics for fundamental physics applications. Among her notable achievements are designing a multiferroic system suited for solid-state experimental searches for the electron's electric dipole moment and identifying materials that exhibit crystallographic analogues of cosmic strings. These interdisciplinary pursuits have also sparked interest in direct detection methods for dark matter.
Her comprehensive body of work is accessible through Google scholar.
Awards and honours
In recognition of her pioneering work on the theoretical underpinnings of multiferroic materials, Spaldin was honored with the James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials from the American Physical Society in 2010. She subsequently received the Rössler Prize from the ETH Zurich Foundation in 2012 and the Körber European Science Prize in 2015. Further accolades include being named a laureate of the 2017 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science. In November 2017, she was presented with the Lise-Meitner Lectureship by the Austrian and German Physical Societies during an event held in Vienna. Her later distinctions encompass the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist (2019), both the IUPAP Magnetism Award and Néel Medal in 2021, followed by the Europhysics Prize from the European Physical Society (2022), the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics (2022), and most recently, the Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award (2023).
Spaldin holds Fellowship status with several esteemed institutions: she was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2008, joined the Materials Research Society as a Fellow in 2011, became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013, and was inducted into the Royal Society as a Fellow in 2017. She is an Honorary Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and gained membership in both Academia Europaea and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences in 2021. On an international scale, she was named a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2019, and later accepted into the French Academy of Sciences (2021), Austrian Academy of Sciences (2022), and German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina (2022). Additionally, Spaldin serves as an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and holds the title of Fellow-Ambassadeur at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
Service
Spaldin contributes to scientific governance through her role on the ERC Scientific Council and is a founding Lead Editor for the journal Physical Review Research.
Teaching
She has been recognized twice with the ETH Golden Owl award for outstanding teaching, along with receiving ETH’s Award for Best Teaching. Spaldin led efforts to overhaul her Department’s Bachelor of Science Curriculum in Materials, with insights shared on her personal blog. Her authored textbook, Magnetic Materials, is published by Cambridge University Press. Selected lectures can also be accessed via her YouTube channel.
External links
- Nicola Spaldin. Nicola Spaldin’s Blog - Occam's Typewriter
- ↑ Nicola Spaldin's Template:ORCID
- ↑ Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs namedLibraryOfCongress - ↑ Spaldin, Nicola A. (2003). Magnetic materials: fundamentals and device applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521016582. OCLC 935635324.
- ↑ Template:Google scholar id
- ↑ Template:EuropePMC
- ↑ Template:Scopus id
- ↑ Wang, J.; Neaton, J. B.; Zheng, H.; Nagarajan, V.; Ogale, S. B.; Liu, B.; Viehland, D.; Vaithyanathan, V.; Schlom, D. G. (2003). "Epitaxial BiFeO₃ Multiferroic Thin Film Heterostructures". Science. 299 (5613): 1719–1722. Bibcode:2003Sci...299.1719W. doi:10.1126/science.1080615. hdl:10220/7391. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 12637741. S2CID 4789558. (subscription required)
- ↑ Ramesh, R.; Spaldin, Nicola A. (2007). "Multiferroics: progress and prospects in thin films". Nature Materials. 6 (1): 21–29. Bibcode:2007NatMa...6...21R. doi:10.1038/nmat1805. PMID 17199122. (subscription required)