Chemistry Seminar - Australia, Women and Rare Earth Chemistry

Title: Australia, Women and Rare Earth Chemistry

Speaker: Professor Colette Boskovic, School of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne

Abstract: The RACI Margaret Sheil Leadership Award was established to honour the trail-blazing contributions of Professor Margaret Sheil AO, the first Australian female Professor of Chemistry. Through numerous and varied leadership roles, Margaret has worked tirelessly to progress the participation, success and recognition of women in chemistry, and science and engineering more generally. In this lecture I will present my own journey as a woman in chemistry and discuss some of the challenges that remain for the full participation of women in science. I received this award largely in recognition of the efforts that I have made to mentor younger women in chemistry, so I am delighted to have the opportunity to present some exciting research discoveries in the area of rare earth chemistry from outstanding women researchers in my research group:  Dr Elodie Rousset and Dr Moya Hay. Rare earth metals are increasingly important for a range of technological applications that make use of their unique electronic, magnetic and optical properties, as well as their chemical reactivity. The term "rare earth" is a misnomer for these relatively abundant metals and Australia is the sixth largest source of rare earth minerals. We are interested in the fundamental chemistry of the electronic structure and resulting optical and magnetic properties of complexes of rare earth metal ions. One area of particular emphasis is metal- and ligand-based redox activity. As part of this investigation we have discovered novel charge-transfer properties and approaches to chemically tuning the rare earth metal redox potential and optical properties. An ultimate aim of this work is to use the insights gained to develop a new class of switchable molecular materials based on rare earth metals with a view to new applications in sensing, displays, optics and electronics for these critical Australian commodities.

Biography: Professor Colette Boskovic is an inorganic chemist with research interests in the area of rare earth and transition metal chemistry. She leads the Inorganic Molecular Materials research group in the School of Chemistry and oversees the Melbourne Magnetometry Laboratory. She is presently Assistant Dean (Graduate Research) in the Faculty of Science. Colette graduated from the University of Melbourne with a BSc(Hons) degree in 1993 and a PhD in 1998. After postdoctoral stints at Indiana University, USA, and the University of Berne, Switzerland, she returned to the School of Chemistry in 2004 as a Lecturer. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2009, Associate Professor in 2016 and Professor in 2022. Colette was awarded the 2004 Selby Research Award from the University of Melbourne, the 2013 Alan Sargeson Lectureship from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) Inorganic Chemistry Division, the 2014 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research (Teaching and Research) from the Faculty of Science, University of Melbourne and the 2022 RACI Margaret Sheil Leadership award. She received an ARC Future fellowship in 2019. Colette was elected a Fellow of the RACI in 2020. She is presently the Immediate Past Chair of the RACI Inorganic Chemistry Division Committee. She is a member of the Organising Committee for the RACI's Inorganic24 conference and the International Advisory Boards for the International Conference on Molecular Magnetism (ICMM), International Conference on Coordination Chemistry (ICCC), Asian Conference on Molecular Magnetism (ACMM) and the Asian Conference on Coordination Chemistry (ACCC).