2008 Fellow Amanda Barnard has won the 2009 Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year for her work on modelling and predicting the shape, structure and stability of nanoparticles under different environmental conditions.
The AUD$50,000 prize is one of the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science.
Amanda Barnard hopes to predict which nanoparticles will work most efficiently and which could be dangerous. Using supercomputers, she’s making the particles in the virtual world and testing how they interact in various environments before they get made in the real world. Her peers told her it couldn’t be done. But this young scientist proved them wrong and now leads the world in her field of nanomorphology—predicting the shape, structure and stability of nanoparticles.
Amanda’s work as the head of the CSIRO Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory, where she moved earlier this year, has focused on a variety of nanoparticles including the titanium dioxide particles found in photovoltaics in solar cells, sunscreens, and on self-cleaning surfaces; metal nanoparticle fuel catalysts; and diamond nanoparticles as delivery vehicles for chemotherapy. She has published several papers this year and has received a number of other awards and honours including the Mercedes-Benz Environmental Research Award from the Banksia Foundation.
Read more about Amanda’s achievements here.
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