Rate My Professor Claire Vallance

Professor Claire Vallance is Professor of Physical Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow in Physical Chemistry at Hertford College. She earned her BSc (Hons) and PhD from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, conducting research on steric effects in collisions of spatially oriented molecules with Peter Harland. In 2002, she commenced a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in the Department of Chemistry and joined Hertford College. She progressed to a University Lectureship in Physical Chemistry associated with Hertford College in 2005 and received the title of Professor of Physical Chemistry in 2014. Earlier, she held a Violette and Samuel Glasstone Fellowship at Oxford. Vallance has served as past President of the Faraday Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. She has also been involved in public outreach through textbooks and reviews on chemical dynamics and spectroscopy.

Her research encompasses chemical reaction dynamics, novel laser spectroscopy techniques for chemical sensing, and the application of mass spectrometry and spectroscopy in clinical medicine. Key areas include photoinduced and electron-induced reactions in the gas phase, ultrafast time-of-flight imaging using PImMS detectors—which she co-invented—and optical microcavities for remote environmental sensing. She co-founded Mode Labs, a University of Oxford spin-out commercializing this technology. Vallance has authored textbooks such as Astrochemistry: from the Big Bang to the Present Day (World Scientific Press, 2017), An Introduction to Chemical Kinetics (Morgan-Claypool Publishing, 2017), An Introduction to the Gas Phase (Morgan-Claypool Publishing, 2017), and Symmetry and Group Theory (ChemLibreTexts). She co-edited Tutorials in Molecular Reaction Dynamics (RSC Publishing, 2010). With over 160 peer-reviewed publications, notable contributions include 'Multi-mass velocity-map imaging of photoinduced and electron-induced chemistry' (Chemical Communications, 2019), 'Covariance-map imaging: a powerful tool for chemical dynamics studies' (Journal of Physical Chemistry A, 2021), and reviews on cavity ringdown spectroscopy and molecular alignment.