Dr Helen Chadwick

Dr Helen Chadwick

Senior Lecturer, Chemistry

Telephone number

+44 (0) 1792 205678 ext 1524
Staff Office - 431
Third Floor
Grove Building
Singleton Campus
Available For Postgraduate Supervision

About

Dr Helen 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 her research as a post-doc in Oxford, before moving to the EPFL in Switzerland in 2013 to perform gas-surface dynamics experiments. At the end of 2016, Dr Chadwick obtained an Advanced Postdoc Mobility Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to spend two years in the Theoretical Chemistry group at Leiden University in the Netherlands, performing calculations to gain further insight into the experiments she did at the EPFL. Dr Chadwick joined the Surface Dynamics group at Swansea University as a Research Officer (senior post-doc) in February 2019, where her main focus has been developing the analysis methods that are used to interpret data measured using the unique molecular beam interferometer housed in the Chemistry Department. She was awarded a Round 7 Future Leaders Fellowship at the beginning of 2024, which aims to develop both the experimental and analysis methods to be able to study gas-surface reactions with the molecular beam interferometer for the first time.

Areas Of Expertise

  • Gas-surface dynamics
  • Stereodynamics
  • Molecular beam scattering

Career Highlights

Research

The Surface Dynamics group has developed a magnetic manipulation technique which allows the rotational and nuclear spin projection states of closed shell ground state molecules to be controlled and manipulated before they collide with a surface. The focus of my research is to develop this technique to answer fundamental questions which have not been possible with previous state of the art methods, including

This work will be extended further through my Future Leaders Fellowship, which will further develop the methodology to determine if it is possible to control the rate of reaction of molecules with surfaces just by changing the rotational orientation of the molecule, and build on a proof of principle study to explore the effect that rotational orientation has on energy transfer between a molecule and a surface.  

For more information, see the research group website.