Nicola Ann Spaldin (born 1969)Nicola Spaldin's FRS is professor of

materials science Materials science is an interdisciplinary field of researching and discovering materials. Materials engineering is an engineering field of finding uses for materials in other fields and industries. The intellectual origins of materials sci ...

ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...

, known for her pioneering research on

multiferroics Multiferroics are defined as materials that exhibit more than one of the primary ferroic properties in the same phase: * ferromagnetism – a magnetisation that is switchable by an applied magnetic field * ferroelectricity – an electric polari ...

Education and early life

A native of

Sunderland, Tyne and Wear Sunderland () is a port City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England. It is a port at the mouth of the River Wear on the North Sea, approximately south-east of Newcastle upon Tyne. It is the most p ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

, Spaldin earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in

natural sciences Natural science or empirical science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer ...

from the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

in 1991, and a PhD in chemistry from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

in 1996. retrieved 2015-06-16.

Career and research

Spaldin was inspired to search for multiferroics,

magnetic Magnetism is the class of physical attributes that occur through a magnetic field, which allows objects to attract or repel each other. Because both electric currents and magnetic moments of elementary particles give rise to a magnetic field, m ...

ferroelectric materials In physics and materials science, ferroelectricity is a characteristic of certain materials that have a spontaneous electric polarization that can be reversed by the application of an external electric field. All ferroelectrics are also piezoe ...

, by a remark about potential collaboration made by a colleague studying ferroelectrics during her

postdoctoral research A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). Postdocs most commonly, but not always, have a temporary acade ...

studying magnetic phenomena at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

from 1996 to 1997. She continued to develop the theory of these materials as a new faculty member at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and in 2000 published (under her previous name, Hill) "a seminal article" that for the first time explained why few such materials were known. Following her theoretical predictions, in 2003 she was part of a team that experimentally demonstrated the multiferroic properties of

bismuth ferrite Bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3, also commonly referred to as BFO in materials science) is an inorganic chemical compound with perovskite structure and one of the most promising multiferroic materials. The room-temperature phase of BiFeO3 is classed as ...

, BiFeO₃. Over the next years she was involved in a number of developments in the rapidly emerging field of multiferroics, including the first demonstration of electric-field control of magnetism in BiFeO₃ (selected by Science magazine as one of their
Areas to watch" in their 2007 Breakthroughs of the Year section
, the discovery of conducting ferroelectric domain walls and a strain-driven morphotropic phase boundary, again in BiFeO₃, and the identification of new mechanisms for multiferroicity, for example the improper geometric ferroelectricity in YMnO₃. In the same time period, she developed and implemented methodology to allow application of finite electric and magnetic fields to metal-insulator heterostructures within the density functional theory formalism, allowing her to solve the long-standing problem of the origin of the dielectric dead layer in capacitors and to identify previously unknown routes to magnetoelectric coupling. Spaldin moved from UCSB to

in 2010. Since then, three particular new directions stand out in her research portfolio. One is the development of the concept and formalism of magnetic multipoles, which require a theory of magnetism beyond the usual magnetic-dipole level. In addition to their importance for magnetoelectric coupling, these have proved relevant for understanding the occurrence of magnetism at the surfaces of compensated antiferromagnets as well as for characterizing phenomena as diverse as altermagnetism and magnetic skyrmions. Second, the establishment of Dynamical Multiferroicity, which spawned interest in so-called chiral phonons and their associated magnetic moments. And third, the unexpected application of multiferroics in other more fundamental branches of physics: She designed a new multiferroic with the precise specifications required to allow a solid-state search for the electric dipole moment of the electron and identified a multiferroic with a symmetry-lowering phase trainsition that generates the crystallographic equivalent of

cosmic strings Cosmic strings are hypothetical 1-dimensional topological defects which may have formed during a symmetry-breaking phase transition in the early universe when the topology of the vacuum manifold associated to this symmetry breaking was not simply ...

. These "cross-over" projects led to a current interest in dark-matter direct detection. Her publications are listed on

Google scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...

Awards and honours

Spaldin was the 2010 winner of the American Physical Society's

James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials The James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials is a prize that has been awarded annually by the American Physical Society since 1975, but was only given that name following its endowment by IBM in 1999. Prior to that it was known as the International ...

, . Retrieved 2015-07-16. the winner of the

Rössler Prize The Rössler Prize, offered by the ETH#ETH Zurich Foundation, ETH Zurich Foundation, is a monetary prize that has been awarded annually since 2009 to a promising young tenured professor of the ETH Zurich in the middle of an accelerating career.< ...

of the ETH Zurich Foundation in 2012, the 2015 winner of the

Körber European Science Prize The Körber European Science Prize is a science and technology award, presented annually by the Körber Foundation in Hamburg, honoring outstanding scientists working in Europe for their promising research projects. The prize is endowed with 1 mil ...

for "laying the theoretical foundation for the new family of multiferroic materials". retrieved 2015-07-16 and one of the laureates of the 2017 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science. In November 2017 she was awarded the Lise-Meitner Lectureship of the Austrian and German Physical Societies in

Vienna Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...

and in 2019 she won the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist. In 2021 she received the IUPAP Magnetism Award and Néel Medal, and in 2022 the Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society and the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics. In 2023, she won the

Gothenburg Gothenburg ( ; ) is the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, second-largest city in Sweden, after the capital Stockholm, and the fifth-largest in the Nordic countries. Situated by the Kattegat on the west coast of Sweden, it is the gub ...

Lise Meitner Award. Spaldin is a

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of ...

(2008), the

Materials Research Society The Materials Research Society (MRS) is a non-profit, professional organization for materials researchers, scientists and engineers. Established in 1973, MRS is a member-driven organization of approximately 13,000 materials researchers from academi ...

(2011), the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is a United States–based international nonprofit with the stated mission of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsib ...

(2013) and the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

(2017), One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: an Honorary Fellow of

Churchill College, Cambridge Churchill College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. It has a primary focus on science, engineering and technology, but retains a strong interest in the arts ...

, and a member of

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of humanities, letters, law, and sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europe ...

(2021) and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (2021). She is a Foreign Associate of the US

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

(2019), the

French Academy of Sciences The French Academy of Sciences (, ) is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French Scientific method, scientific research. It was at the forefron ...

(2021), the

Austrian Academy of Sciences The Austrian Academy of Sciences (; ÖAW) is a legal entity under the special protection of the Republic of Austria. According to the statutes of the Academy its mission is to promote the sciences and humanities in every respect and in every fi ...

(2022) and the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina (2022). She is an External Scientific Member of the

Max Planck Society The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, it was renamed to the M ...

and a Fellow-Ambassadeur of the

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

Service

Spaldin is a member of the ERC Scientific Council and a founding Lead Editor of

Physical Review Research Physical may refer to: *Physical examination In a physical examination, medical examination, clinical examination, or medical checkup, a medical practitioner examines a patient for any possible medical signs or symptoms of a Disease, medical co ...

Teaching

Spaldin has twice received the ETH Golden Owl for Teaching Excellence as well as the ETH Award for Best Teaching. Some of her lectures are available on her youtube channel. She coordinated the revision of her Department's BSc Curriculum in Materials and documented it in
blog.
Her textbook on Magnetic Materials is published by

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...

References

External links

* Nicola Spaldin
Nicola Spaldin’s Blog
-

Occam's Typewriter Richard P. Grant is a British people, British biologist and former writer/editor of ''The Scientist (magazine), The Scientist''. Early life and education Grant's father was a non-commissioned officer in the Royal Air Force. At University of Ox ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Spaldin, Nicola Ann 1969 births Living people People from Sunderland British materials scientists Women materials scientists and engineers Alumni of the University of Cambridge University of California, Berkeley alumni University of California, Santa Barbara faculty Academic staff of ETH Zurich Fellows of the American Physical Society Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Members of Academia Europaea Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science laureates 21st-century American women scientists Female fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the Royal Society Foreign associates of the National Academy of Engineering American women academics American materials scientists Recipients of IUPAP sponsored awards