Dr Charlotte Petersen receives 2023 Selby Research Award

Faculty of Science researcher Dr Charlotte Petersen has received the prestigious annual Selby Research Award from the Selby Scientific Foundation for her outstanding work in chemistry.

Dr Petersen – a lecturer and Australian Research Council DECRA fellow in the School of Chemistry – received this year’s $21,000 prize for her project, Breaking the second law of thermodynamics with thermal fluctuations, that aims to develop new statistical mechanical relationships that can be readily applied to experiments in the future.

The Selby Research Award provides funds to assist an outstanding early career academic to establish their research career in chemistry or a related discipline.

“Predicting the behaviour of nanoscale technologies is challenging for many reasons. This generous award will allow me to study a new material designed for easy observation of thermal fluctuations, and link the predictions of theory to measurable quantities,” Dr Petersen said.

Dr Petersen's research interests span a diverse range of areas including nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, frustrated materials, and glassy liquids.

Dr Petersen completed her PhD in 2016 from the Australian National University in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. She then moved to Aalto University in Finland to investigate computationally the dynamics of nanomagnets. Following this, Dr Petersen was awarded a Lise Meitner fellowship to study the glass transition in confined and modulated liquids, which she took up at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

In 2020, Dr Petersen moved to the University of Queensland to work on nonequilibrium statistical mechanics.

In 2022, Dr Petersen joined the University of Melbourne’s School of Chemistry, where she is investigating the structure of glass from particle vibrations, as part of her DECRA fellowship.

Dr Charlotte Petersen