Nicola Spaldin

Nicola A. Spaldin is a professor of materials theory at ETH Zurich, known for her pioneering research on multiferroics. She is the 2015 winner of the Körber European Science Prize for "laying the theoretical foundation for the new family of multiferroic materials".

Spaldin earned a bachelor's degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1991, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996. She was inspired to search for multiferroics, magnetic ferroelectric materials, by a remark about potential collaboration made by a colleague studying magnetic phenomena during her postdoctorate studying ferroelectrics at Yale University in 1996–1997. She continued to study the theory of these materials as a new faculty member at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and in 2000 published "a seminal article" that for the first time explained why few such materials were known. In 2003 she was part of a team that experimentally demonstrated the multiferroic properties of bismuth ferrite. She moved from UCSB to ETH Zurich in 2010.

As well as winning the Körber Prize, Spaldin is a fellow of the American Physical Society (2008) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2013), and the 2010 winner of the American Physical Society's James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials.