Tilden Prize 2011 Winner

Awarded for his pioneering studies of the formation and properties of ultracold molecules, particularly the novel molecular collisions that occur in the fully quantum-mechanical regime below 1 millikelvin.

About the Winner

Jeremy Hutson's research is on the theory of cold and ultracold molecules. Ultracold molecules have novel quantum properties and many potential applications, ranging from high-precision measurement to quantum information processing. They are also beginning to form the basis for a new ultracold chemistry in which bimolecular as well as unimolecular processes can be coherently controlled.

Jeremy has worked both on the formation of ultracold molecules from ultracold atoms and on methods for cooling warm molecules to the ultracold regime. His speciality is the theory of interactions and collisions in the fully quantum-mechanical regime that emerges at temperatures below 1 mK.

Jeremy received his BA and D Phil degrees from the University of Oxford, working with Brian Howard on the spectroscopy of Van der Waals complexes. He spent the period 1981-1983 as an SRC Postdoctoral Fellow with Robert Le Roy at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, before returning to the UK as Drapers' Company and then Stokes Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he worked mostly on the theory of atom-surface scattering. He was appointed to a Lectureship at the University of Durham in 1987, where he was promoted to Reader (1993) and Professor (1996). He served as Head of the Department of Chemistry in 1998-2001.

Jeremy's previous awards include the Corday-Morgan Medal (1991), the RSC Computational Chemistry Award (2007) and the Kolos Medal of the University of Warsaw and the Polish Chemical Society (2007). He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2010.