Raffaella Demichelis, Curtin University, Australia

2022 Houtermans Award medallist

Raffaella Demichelis is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow and holds a Senior Lecturer appointment at Curtin University, in Western Australia. She has led award-winning research into the structure and nucleation of biominerals. By providing definitive evidence in favour of a new non-classical nucleation theory, she changed the way we think about the nucleation and crystal growth of minerals. She opened new perspectives in the description of complex minerals, including minerals presenting multiple structures – a new concept that she independently developed – and mineral nanotubes with peculiar stability versus size/chirality profiles. She has co-authored software packages and developed tools, both independently and in collaboration, which model with high accuracy challenging systems (e.g. mineral nanotubes; ions in water). These tools are used worldwide in academia and industry, across the broad fields of chemistry, geochemistry and mineralogy.

Raffaella is originally from Italy, where she obtained a PhD in Chemical Sciences at the University of Torino in 2010. During her master thesis and PhD, she worked under the supervision of Prof Roberto Dovesi on modelling the structure and properties of aluminosilicates and carbon and inorganic nanotubes via first principle methods. This work also includes the development and implementation of tools for modelling vibrational spectra and materials with curled structures. Part of this work received the Ernesto Fea award for the best master thesis in mineralogy from the Faculty of Science.

Soon after she moved to Australia for a post-doctoral position in Prof. Julian Gale’s group, where she received mentoring in career development, and training in developing potential models and in molecular dynamics techniques applied to mineral-fluid interfaces. After two years, she was successful in securing two subsequent competitive research fellowships (Early Career Curtin Research Fellowship, ARC Future Fellowship) on top of other university-based and national grants. Through this funding, Raffaella could start developing her independent academic career and building her research group. She currently leads an emerging team at Curtin University who does interdisciplinary research at the boundary between the fields of computational materials chemistry and geochemistry.

Raffaella spreads her enthusiasm for science through engaging with outreach and community building activities. She co-initiated networks in WA aimed to teach software skills to PhD students (through the Software Carpentry project) and the WA Women in Chemistry group (under the auspices of the Royal Australian Chemical Society), as well as she volunteers much of her time to visit schools and mentor kids to possible STEM career paths with the double purpose of also showcasing gender diversity in STEM.
As a culturally and linguistically diverse woman in STEM with caring responsibilities who has gone through significant and extended career breaks due to maternity and part time work, she has faced numerous barriers to career progression and is using her experience to advocate for a mentally safe, flexible and inclusive research environment, allowing for more sustainable and diverse career paths. Indeed, she contributes much of her time to equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives both locally and nationally.

Raffaella has received national and international recognition for her research and community engagement through being the recipient of the 2015 Caglioti prize for Early Career Chemists (Italian Academy of Science) and a 2020 WA Young Tall Poppy awardee.

Additional information and a list of publications can be found here.