{"id":167475,"date":"2023-07-13T22:23:44","date_gmt":"2023-07-14T03:23:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/07\/engineering-world-changing-materials-nicola-spaldin-on-the-importance-of-curiosity-driven-research-and-what-it-means-to-be-a-physicist"},"modified":"2023-07-13T22:23:44","modified_gmt":"2023-07-14T03:23:44","slug":"engineering-world-changing-materials-nicola-spaldin-on-the-importance-of-curiosity-driven-research-and-what-it-means-to-be-a-physicist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/07\/engineering-world-changing-materials-nicola-spaldin-on-the-importance-of-curiosity-driven-research-and-what-it-means-to-be-a-physicist","title":{"rendered":"Engineering world-changing materials: Nicola Spaldin on the importance of curiosity-driven research and what it means to be a physicist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/engineering-world-changing-materials-nicola-spaldin-on-the-importance-of-curiosity-driven-research-and-what-it-means-to-be-a-physicist2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When <a href=\"https:\/\/theory.mat.ethz.ch\/people\/person-detail.MTc3MjY0.TGlzdC8yNDIzLDExMDc5MzA0OTc=.html\">Nicola Spaldin<\/a> began studying natural sciences at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cam.ac.uk\/\">University of Cambridge<\/a> in 1988, she planned on becoming a physicist, but then quickly reconsidered. \u201cAfter about the second lecture I completely changed my mind,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI thought \u2018I\u2019m absolutely not clever enough to be a physicist.\u2019 Everybody was very brilliant and I was not.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Yet it seems Spaldin was vastly underestimating herself. Now a professor of materials science at ETH Zurich, she won two major awards for physics last year: the <a href=\"https:\/\/mat.ethz.ch\/news-and-events\/news\/news-archive\/2022\/06\/2022-eps-condensed-matter-division-europhysics-prize-awarded-to-nicola-spaldin.html\">EPS Europhysics Prize<\/a> and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.joachim-herz-stiftung.de\/en\/about-us\/prices\/hamburg-prize-for-theoretical-physics#:~:text=Nicola%20Spaldin%20was%20honored%20in, devices%20or%20highly%20sensitive%20sensors.\">Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics<\/a>. Both accolades cited Spaldin\u2019s pioneering work on the theory of magnetoelectric multiferroics \u2013 materials that are both ferromagnetic and ferroelectric. These properties are rarely found together, making it very difficult to engineer substances with both, but they have many exciting potential applications, from microelectronics to medicine.<\/p>\n<p>\\r \\r<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Nicola Spaldin began studying natural sciences at the University of Cambridge in 1988, she planned on becoming a physicist, but then quickly reconsidered. \u201cAfter about the second lecture I completely changed my mind,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI thought \u2018I\u2019m absolutely not clever enough to be a physicist.\u2019 Everybody was very brilliant and I was not.\u201d [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-engineering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}