Nicola Spaldin

A native of Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England, Spaldin earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1991, and a PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996.^[10][11]

Spaldin was inspired to search for multiferroics, magnetic ferroelectric materials, by a remark about potential collaboration made by a colleague studying ferroelectrics during her postdoctoral research studying magnetic phenomena at Yale University from 1996 to 1997.^[12] 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"^[13] that for the first time explained why few such materials were known.^[14] Following her theoretical predictions, in 2003 she was part of a team that experimentally demonstrated the multiferroic properties of bismuth ferrite, BiFeO₃.^[15] 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^[16] (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^[17] and a strain-driven morphotropic phase boundary,^[18] again in BiFeO₃, and the identification of new mechanisms for multiferroicity, for example the improper geometric ferroelectricity in YMnO₃.^[19] 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,^[20] allowing her to solve the long-standing problem of the origin of the dielectric dead layer in capacitors^[21] and to identify previously unknown routes to magnetoelectric coupling.^[22]

Spaldin moved from UCSB to ETH Zurich in 2010.^[11] 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,^[23] these have proved relevant for understanding the occurrence of magnetism at the surfaces of compensated antiferromagnets^[24] as well as for characterizing phenomena as diverse as altermagnetism^[25] and magnetic skyrmions.^[26] Second, the establishment of dynamical multiferroicity,^[27] which spawned interest in so-called chiral phonons and their associated magnetic moments.^[28] 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^[29] and identified a multiferroic with a symmetry-lowering phase trainsition that generates the crystallographic equivalent of cosmic strings.^[30] These "cross-over" projects led to a current interest in dark-matter direct detection.

Some of her lectures are available on her Youtube channel.^[31] She coordinated the revision of her Department's BSc Curriculum in Materials and documented it in a blog.

Spaldin was the 2010 winner of the American Physical Society's James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials,^[32] the winner of the Rössler Prize of the ETH Zurich Foundation in 2012,^[33] the 2015 winner of the Körber European Science Prize for "laying the theoretical foundation for the new family of multiferroic materials"^[15][11][13] and one of the laureates of the 2017 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science.^[34] In November 2017 she was awarded the Lise-Meitner Lectureship of the Austrian and German Physical Societies in Vienna^[35][36] and in 2019 she won the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist.^[37][38] In 2021 she received the IUPAP Magnetism Award and Néel Medal,^[39] and in 2022 the Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society^[40] and the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics.^[41] In 2023, she won the Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award.^[42]

Spaldin is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2008), the Materials Research Society (2011), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2013)^[11] and the Royal Society (2017),^[43] an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and a member of Academia Europaea (2021)^[44] and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (2021).^[45] She is a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering (2019)^[46] and the US National Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences (2021), the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2022) and the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina (2022).^[47] She is an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society^[48] and a Fellow-Ambassadeur of the CNRS.^[49]

In 2026, she was chosen as a Clarivate Citation laureate in Physics, as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics "for fundamental theoretical developments leading to the establishment of room-temperature magnetoelectric multiferroics, which are enabling new energy-efficient device paradigms."^[50]

Spaldin is a member of the ERC Scientific Council^[51] and a founding Lead Editor of Physical Review Research.^[52]

Spaldin has twice received the ETH Golden Owl for Teaching Excellence^[53] as well as the ETH Award for Best Teaching.^[54]

Her textbook Magnetic Materials was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.^[55]