Nicola Spaldin

Biosketch

Nicola Spaldin is the Professor for Materials Theory at ETH Zürich. She received a BA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University, a PhD in Chemistry from UC Berkeley and was a postdoctoral researcher in Applied Physics at Yale University, before establishing her independent career in the Materials Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is a passionate science educator, coordinator of her department’s curriculum project “The Materials Scientist 2030, Who is She?” and holder of multiple ETH Golden Owl awards for excellence in teaching. When not trying to design exotic new materials she can be found playing her clarinet, or skiing or climbing in the Alps.

Research Interests

Spaldin develops and applies electronic structure methods to design and understand new materials with novel and potentially useful electromagnetic properties. She is particularly excited about materials that combine multiple, technologically desirable functionalities that tend not to co-exist, and is best known for her development of Magnetoelectric Multiferroics, which combine the chemically contra-indicated properties ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity. Other material types of interest are those with multiple coupled or competing instabilities, which in turn show strong responses to electric or magnetic fields or strain, and strongly correlated materials, in which the behavior of each electron explicitly influences that of the others. She enjoys applying electronic structure methods in fields beyond materials physics, and has collaborative projects in dark matter direct detection and modeling of early universe processes.