Rate My Professor Nicholas Chilton

Nicholas Chilton is Professor of Chemistry in the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University, holding a joint appointment as Professor of Computational and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Manchester. He earned a B.Sc. (Advanced Honours, first class) in Chemistry from Monash University, Australia, in 2011, with an honours project supervised by Professors Stuart R. Batten and Keith S. Murray. He completed his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Manchester, UK, in 2015, with a thesis entitled “Magnetic Anisotropy of Transition Metal Complexes” supervised by Professors Eric J. L. McInnes and Richard E. P. Winpenny. At Manchester, his career advanced from Post-Doctoral Research Associate (2015) and Research Fellow (2016) to Ramsay Memorial Research Fellow (2016–2018), Presidential Fellow (2018–2019), Royal Society University Research Fellow (2019–2023), Senior Lecturer (2019–2022), and Professor of Computational and Theoretical Chemistry (2022–present). He joined the Australian National University in 2023.

Research in the Chilton group centers on the magnetic properties of molecules, using computational methods including density functional theory (DFT) and complete active space self-consistent field (CASSCF), as well as experimental techniques such as electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometry, and inelastic neutron scattering (INS). Focus areas encompass spin dynamics, single-molecule magnetism, molecular spin qubits, and magnetic resonance imaging agents. Chilton, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), Royal Australian Chemical Institute (FRACI), and Higher Education Academy (FHEA), has received the Dalton Young Researchers Award (2015) and Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize (2021) from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Olivier Kahn International Award (2019) from the European Institute of Molecular Magnetism, the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2022), and the Zasshikai Lectureship Prize (2023). Key publications include “Soft magnetic hysteresis in a dysprosium amide-alkene complex up to 100 K” (Nature, 2025), “Magnetic hysteresis up to 73 K in a dysprosium cyclopentadienyl-amide single-molecule magnet” (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2025), “In-field and zero-field relaxation dynamics of dysprosocenium in solution” (J. Phys. Chem. A, 2025), and “Strong uranium-phosphorus antiferromagnetic exchange coupling in a crystalline diphosphorus radical trianion actinide complex” (Chem., 2025). His work advances molecular magnetism for quantum technologies and data storage.