Nicola Spaldin

Research in the Materials Theory group uses a combination of first-principles and phenomenological theoretical techniques to study the fundamental physics of novel materials that are of potential technological importance. Projects combine the development of new theoretical methods, application of the methods to existing materials, design of new materials with specific functionalities and subsequent synthesis of the "designer materials". Specific materials classes of interest are:

Magnetoelectric Multiferroics, which are materials that are simultaneously ferromagnetic and ferroelectric. These fall into our broader interest in Contra-indicated Multifunctional Materials, which combine multiple, technologically desirable functionalities that tend not to co-exist.

Transition-Metal Oxides with "strong correlations", in which the behaviour of each electron explicitly influences that of the others. These strong correlations often result in multiple coupled or competing instabilities, which in turn show strong tunable responses to electric or magnetic fields or strain. Here, we would particularly like to make a room-temperature superconductor.

Nicola A. Spaldin is the Professor of Materials Theory in the Department of Materials at ETH Zürich.

She studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, where she obtained a B.A. in Natural Sciences in 1991. She then moved  to the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her PhD in Chemistry in 1996. She next worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Applied Physics Department at Yale University, before moving back to California, where she was Assistant Professor (1997-2002), Associate Professor (2002-2006) then Full Professor (2006 - 2010) in UC Santa Barbara’s Materials Department. She moved to ETH in 2011.

Spaldin has been a visiting professor at several institutions: Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, India (2000), Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge University, UK (2003), Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA (2007) and the Materials Theory Division at Uppsala University (2010).