Rate My Professor Jodie Bradby

Jodie Bradby is a Professor at the Research School of Physics at the Australian National University, where she serves as Director of the school and leads the Advanced Materials Group on high pressure physics. She earned a B. Appl. Sci. in Physics from RMIT University in Melbourne and a PhD from the Australian National University in 2003 on ‘Nanoindentation-induced deformation of semiconductors’. Following her doctorate, she held a Sir Keith Murdoch American-Australian Education Fellowship for postdoctoral research at Case Western Reserve University in the USA. Back in Australia, Bradby received an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, a QEII Fellowship, and a Future Fellowship from 2014 to 2017. She has secured several ARC grants, including Linkage Projects with a startup company formed from her PhD work. Bradby is the current President of the Australian Institute of Physics and has published over 100 papers along with three patents.

Bradby's research focuses on the physical response of materials to pressure, particularly nano-mechanical properties of brittle materials such as semiconductors (silicon, germanium, carbon), glasses, and biomaterials including plant cells and micro-marine creatures impacted by ocean acidification. Her expertise covers nanoindentation of semiconductors undergoing phase transformations for novel materials and devices, high pressure physics, new phase synthesis, and deformation processes. Notable publications include "Compression of [121]Tetramantane to over 50 GPa - Phase transformations and elastic properties" (2025), "Comparison of hydrostatic and non-hydrostatic compression of glassy carbon to 80 GPa" (Carbon, 2024), "Stacking faults along the {111} planes seed pressure-induced phase transformation in single crystal silicon" (Applied Physics Letters, 2024), "Extensively Microtwinned Diamond with Nanolaminates of Lonsdaleite Formed by Flash Laser Heating of Glassy Carbon" (Nano Letters, 2023), and "Hardness of nano- and microcrystalline lonsdaleite" (Applied Physics Letters, 2023). Awards include Gold in the Materials Research Society Graduate Student competition (2002), the Philips Cowley-Moodie Award for Australian Electron Microscopy, and the Australian Institute of Physics Women in Physics Lecturer (2015). She engages in outreach via public lectures, school visits, and media.