[1][4] Chilton completed his Advanced Bachelor of Science (Honors) degree at Monash University in 2011 where he finished his final year project with Stuart R. Batten and Keith S.
[3] His research at Monash included the synthesis and characterization of low-symmetry dysprosium complexes,[5][6] and mixed-metallic lanthanide-transition metal clusters,[7] that display single molecule magnetism.
In 2016, he was awarded the British Ramsay Memorial Fellowship (2016–2018) to research how coordination chemistry can be used to engineer specific magnetic states of lanthanide ions.
Chilton's research is in the areas of computational chemistry and magnetochemistry, specifically on the design of high-temperature single molecule magnets, molecular spin qubits for quantum information science, understanding paramagnetic MRI contrast agents, unravelling the electronic structure of uranium coordination complexes, magnetic interactions between f-elements, and in developing computational methods and tools.
[13] In 2013, with Alessandro Soncini he designed a computer program for the determination of the orientation of the magnetic anisotropy of the mJ = ±15/2 state of DyIII via electrostatic optimization of the aspherical electron density distribution.