Nicola Spaldin, instrumental in developing the field of magnetic ferroelectrics, will be the featured speaker at the next event in the Director’s Women in Science Speaker series on Thursday, Dec. 19 at 10 a.m. Her talk will be in the third-floor conference room of Building 91, the new Integrative Genomics Building (IGB). The IGB is a badged building; you will need your Lab badge to access the building’s exterior door. (You can also watch the livestreamed talk online).
Currently a professor of Materials Theory at ETH Zurich, Prof. Spaldin is well known for her work developing the class of materials known as multiferroics, for which she received the American Physical Society’s McGroddy Prize, the Koerber European Science Prize, the L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science award, and the Swiss Science Prize Marcel-Benoist among many others.
She and her team are studying magnetoelectric multiferroics, which are materials that are simultaneously ferromagnetic and ferroelectric, and transition-metal oxides that could be used to make a room-temperature superconductor.Dr. Spaldin received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley and served as a professor in the UC Santa Barbara Materials Department before moving to Switzerland. She is a passionate science educator, coordinator of the curriculum development project “The Materials Scientist 2030, Who is She?”, and holder of the ETH Golden Owl Award for excellence in teaching. She believes that scientific discoveries can come not just from following traditional paths, but also from young scientists who follow “the question that for [them] is the most interesting in the world.”
