Rate My Professor Michelle Coote

Professor Michelle Coote is a Matthew Flinders Professor in Chemistry at Flinders University in the College of Science and Engineering. She completed a B.Sc. (Hons) in industrial chemistry at the University of New South Wales in 1995 and a Ph.D. in polymer chemistry at the same institution in 2000. Following her doctorate, she undertook postdoctoral fellowships in polymer physics at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2001 and in computational chemistry at the Australian National University from 2001 to 2004. She established her own research group at the Australian National University in 2004 and was promoted to Professor there in 2011 before moving to Flinders University in 2022.

Her research focuses on theoretical and experimental chemistry, including polymer chemistry, radical chemistry, organic synthesis, physical chemistry and organometallic catalysis, with emphasis on non-traditional methods of bond activation using electricity and light. She has designed improved control agents and catalysts for polymer synthesis, safe electrochemical methods for generating carbocations, greener catalysts for cross-coupling, and chiral auxiliaries for amino acid resolution. Professor Coote has also advanced understanding of polymer autoxidation and the use of electric fields to catalyse chemical reactions. She is a Georgina Sweet ARC Laureate Fellow, an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, and an Executive Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Her awards include the RACI Cornforth Medal (2000), Rennie Medal (2006), HG Smith Medal (2016) and Leighton Memorial Medal (2021), as well as the Australian Academy of Science Le Fevre Memorial Medal (2010) and the IUPAC Prize for Young Scientists (2001). She serves on editorial boards and has held leadership roles in professional societies and ARC committees.