Rate My Professor Nigel Marks

Associate Professor Nigel Marks is a computational materials scientist in the Discipline of Physics and Astronomy at Curtin University, part of the School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences. He leads the Curtin Carbon Group, a multidisciplinary team conducting computational and experimental research on carbon materials such as amorphous carbons, nanoporous carbons, nanodiamonds, and carbides. The group's work includes developing the online Carbon Potentials tool for comparing interatomic potentials, simulating graphitization processes, investigating nanodiamond nucleation in amorphous carbons, and depositing amorphous carbon thin films via high-power impulse magnetron sputtering. Marks earned his PhD in 1997 from the University of Sydney. His early career featured postdoctoral research at the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne, followed by positions at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and Queen’s University Belfast. He then spent five years as a teaching and research academic at the University of Sydney before joining Curtin University in 2008 to establish a nuclear materials simulation program centered on carbon-based systems.

Marks' research emphasizes atomistic computer simulations, with interests in carbon self-assembly, radiation damage in solids, semiconductor nanostructures, and chemical effects from beta-decay. In 2012, he received an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship valued at $802,356 for nanodiamond synthesis from carbon onions. As an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Carbon Science and Innovation, he contributes to advancing carbon science. Marks has produced 186 publications garnering over 6,000 citations. Notable works include "High-pressure pathways for the formation of amorphous diamond and other tetrahedrally-bonded phases from glassy carbon" (2025), "Influence of screw dislocations on stacking order in graphite" (2025), "Mechanisms of nanodiamond and amorphous diamond-like carbon formation following room temperature compression of C60" (2025), "On the supercritical adsorption of molecular hydrogen and deuterium in microporous carbons" (2025), and "Ion implantation in nanodiamonds: Size effect and energy dependence" (2026). In 2025, his team won the Curtinnovation Award for a battery technology breakthrough, highlighting his impact on energy storage and advanced materials development.