Helen Chadwick

Dr. Helen Chadwick is a Senior Lecturer in the Chemistry Department at Swansea University, where she is part of the Surface Dynamics research group within the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She specializes in gas-surface dynamics, with a focus on controlling molecular rotation to study fundamental aspects of surface reactions.

Dr. Chadwick completed her MChem at the University of Oxford in 2008 and her DPhil in Physical Chemistry in 2012. She received an EPSRC doctoral prize to continue as a post-doc at Oxford before moving to the EPFL in Switzerland in 2013. At the end of 2016, she obtained an Advanced Postdoc Mobility Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to work at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Her research focuses on developing magnetic manipulation techniques that allow control of rotational and nuclear spin projection states of closed shell ground state molecules before they collide with surfaces. Key questions she investigates include how molecular rotational orientation affects collision outcomes, whether rotational energy transfer can be controlled, and if single collisions can cause nuclear spin flips. Her work has been extended through her Round 7 Future Leaders Fellowship, which aims to develop experimental and analysis methods to study gas-surface reactions with molecular beam interferometry.

Dr. Chadwick's publication record shows consistent advancement in gas-surface interaction studies, with recent work emphasizing rotational orientation control, magnetic beam techniques, and quantum state-resolved measurements. Her research bridges experimental physical chemistry with theoretical approaches to understand fundamental surface reaction dynamics at unprecedented levels of detail.

Her scientific achievements include:

• EPSRC doctoral prize
• Advanced Postdoc Mobility Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation
• Round 7 Future Leaders Fellowship (awarded in 2024)

Dr. Chadwick actively supervises PhD students on projects related to molecule-surface interactions, magnetic beam imaging, and nuclear spin conversion. She has developed the analysis methods used with Swansea's unique molecular beam interferometer and continues to advance this technology through her Future Leaders Fellowship, which aims to control reaction rates by manipulating molecular rotation.

As a key member of the Surface Dynamics group, she has pioneered methods that allow researchers to answer fundamental questions about gas-surface collisions that were previously unanswerable with state-of-the-art techniques, providing new insights into reaction mechanisms at the molecular level.