Rate My Professor Michelle Coote

Professor Michelle Coote is an Honorary Professor in the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University. A graduate of the University of New South Wales, she earned her B.Sc. (Hons) in industrial chemistry in 1995 and Ph.D. in polymer chemistry in 2000. After postdoctoral research at the University of Durham, UK, she joined ANU's Research School of Chemistry in 2001 as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Leo Radom, established her independent research group in 2004, and was promoted to Professor in 2011. Her research utilizes quantum chemistry calculations to explore mechanisms, kinetics, and thermodynamics of multi-step chemical processes, with applications in computer-aided reagent design, electric field effects on reactions, enzyme catalysis, materials with tunable debonding, and stereocontrol in free radical polymerization. She collaborates with experimental and industry groups and established a polymer chemistry lab at ANU, while serving as a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science.

Professor Coote has garnered numerous accolades, including the Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellowship (2017), ANU Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research (2019), RACI Leighton Memorial Medal (2021), RACI Physical Division Medal (2020), Le Fèvre Memorial Prize (Australian Academy of Science, 2010), Pople Medal of the Asia-Pacific Association for Theoretical and Computational Chemistry (2015), HG Smith Medal (2016), and election as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (2014). She holds the position of Executive Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the first Australian in this role, and delivered the Paul Schleyer Lectureship (2018). Her impactful publications feature "Electrostatic catalysis of a Diels–Alder reaction" (Nature, 2016), "Switching Radical Stability By pH-Induced Orbital Conversion" (Nature Chemistry, 2013), "First Principles Modelling of Free-Radical Polymerization Kinetics" (Int. Rev. Phys. Chem., 2013), and "Origin and scope of long-range stabilizing interactions and associated SOMO-HOMO conversion in distonic radical anions" (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2013).