Professor Sharon Ashbrook FRSC

Winner: 2021 Faraday Division mid-career Award: Bourke-Liversidge Award

University of St Andrews

For exploiting multinuclear NMR spectroscopy, combined with first-principles calculations, to probe local structure and chemical reactivity in inorganic materials.

Celebrate Professor Sharon Ashbrook

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When I was younger, I always suffered particularly badly from poor self-confidence and always worried I wasn’t 'good enough'. I have been lucky to have good mentors both in my research area and within the university who have helped and supported me in my career, encouraging me to apply for promotion etc.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is one of the most widely used analytical tools in chemistry and one of the most powerful. As practically all elements in the periodic table can be studied using NMR, the technique is used in wide-ranging areas including materials science, geochemistry, biology and medicine. The sensitivity of NMR to the atomic-scale structure, without relying on any long-range order, has resulted in the relatively recent development of NMR as an important method for the study of solids, and it is of particular use for understanding disordered materials.

Professor Ashbrook's research group are developing new experimental methodologies to improve both the resolution and sensitivity of NMR spectra, designing new synthetic procedures to cost-effectively enrich materials in nuclear species of interest (eg ¹³C or ¹⁷O). They also use advanced computational methods to predict spectra and understand the complicated lineshapes observed. By understanding the detailed arrangement of atoms within a material they can potentially be controlled to create new and better materials in the future.

Read winner biography

Sharon Ashbrook is Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of St Andrews. Following a DPhil at the University of Oxford (2001), she completed postdoctoral work at the University of Exeter, before being awarded a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship in 2003 which she held at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge. During this time, she also held the Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellowship at Darwin College. From October 2005, she was appointed as an RCUK Academic Fellow in the School of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews, was promoted to Reader in 2009 and Professor in 2013.

Professor Ashbrook's research focuses on the application of NMR spectroscopy and first-principles calculations to investigate structure, disorder and chemical reactivity in inorganic solids: she has published over 190 papers in this area. She was awarded the RSC Harrison Prize (2004), Marlow Award (2011), the RSE Makdougall Brisbane Medal (2012) and the RSC Corday-Morgan Prize. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and held a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award (2015-2020). She is a member of the Facility Executive of the UK High-Field Solid State NMR Facility and is Director of the Centre of Magnetic Resonance in St Andrews.

Her interests in outreach include chairing the Tayside RSC Local Section and promoting women in STEM, co-authoring Academic Women Now (2016) and Academic Women Here (2018). She was awarded a Suffrage Science Award in 2017.

Q+A

How did you first become interested in chemistry?

I was first encouraged to study science when younger by my Dad (who argued very strongly to my secondary school that I should be allowed to take three sciences at GCSE rather than doing Art…) but my interest in chemistry specifically was sparked by a very enthusiastic high school teacher.

What motivates you?

I was famed for always asking why things happen, even as a young child, and I think the general desire to understand what happens and why it happens motivates my research, no matter what the specific experiment or problem. I like trying to instil some order and understanding into apparently random or varied observations, so that that knowledge can then be applied elsewhere.

What advice would you give to a young person considering a career in chemistry?

When younger, I used to worry that other people seemed to have planned out their careers to a much greater extent than I had. However, the best advice I was given is to do what you enjoy and what you find interesting and exciting and the rest will follow.

What has been a highlight for you (either personally or in your career)?

A personal highlight in my career was my promotion to Professor in 2013, after which I gave an inaugural lecture which my parents, family, friends and colleagues attended, and I was able to explain what we did, why it was interesting and why it mattered to this wide-ranging set of people.

What has been a challenge for you (either personally or in your career)?

Why do you think teamwork is important in science?

The challenging problems that the world is currently facing will only be solved by combining expertise from different areas, and by exploiting the specialist skills of different researchers. This will be achieved most easily by diverse and expert teams of motivated researchers who can achieve more together than they can individually.

What is your favourite element?

My favourite element is oxygen, and specifically ¹⁷O, as this is the isotope I studied during much of my PhD work using NMR spectroscopy. This isotope was also the subject of my recent ERC grant and is the focus of much of our current work on studying disorder in solids.