Nicola Ann Spaldin (born 1969)[5][4] FRS is professor of materials science at ETH Zurich, known for her pioneering research on multiferroics.

[16] Over the next years she was involved in a number of developments in the rapidly emerging field of multiferroics, including the first demonstration of electric-field control of magnetism in BiFeO3[17] (selected by Science magazine as one of their "Areas to watch" in their 2007 Breakthroughs of the Year section), the discovery of conducting ferroelectric domain walls[18] and a strain-driven morphotropic phase boundary,[19] again in BiFeO3, and the identification of new mechanisms for multiferroicity, for example the improper geometric ferroelectricity in YMnO3.

[20] In the same time period, she developed and implemented methodology to allow application of finite electric and magnetic fields to metal-insulator heterostructures within the density functional theory formalism,[21] allowing her to solve the long-standing problem of the origin of the dielectric dead layer in capacitors[22] and to identify previously unknown routes to magnetoelectric coupling.

[34] In November 2017 she was awarded the Lise-Meitner Lectureship of the Austrian and German Physical Societies in Vienna[35][36] and in 2019 she won the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist.

[48] Spaldin is a member of the ERC Scientific Council[49] and a founding Lead Editor of Physical Review Research.

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