Sally Brooker

Biography

 Sally did her PhD with Dr Vickie McKee at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand (Vickie is now a Professor at Loughborough University), then a postdoc with Professor George Sheldrick (of SHELX fame) at Göttingen University in Germany. She then returned to NZ to take up a lectureship at the University of Otago, the first position she applied for, where she is now a full professor. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Royal Society of New Zealand and New Zealand Institute of Chemistry. Recent awards include the 2011 Royal Society of Chemistry Australasian Lectureship, the 2009 NZIC Maurice Wilkins Centre Prize for Excellence in Chemical Research and the 2008 Francis Lions Memorial Lectureship at Sydney University. She loves supervising her large, multinational, highly productive and high impact research team (over 160 papers to date, h = 34 Web of Science, PhD 1989), Brookers Bunch.

Research Interest

 We have prepared and characterised some key dinuclear spin crossover systems, including the first dicobalt complex to undergo simultaneous magnetic exchange and spin crossover, and the first structurally characterised dimetallic complex in which one metal ion is high spin whilst the other is low spin. We have developed access to a range of key families of related ligands so our current focus is on preparing iron and cobalt complexes of these ligands in order to test and extend our understanding of such complexes and their SCO behaviour. In collaboration with Professor Annie Powell (Karlsruhe), larger clusters of metal ions are also being targeted, consistent with another of our aims, the preparation of soluble single molecule magnets (SMMs). We have recently reported the first SMMs to be designed and made in NZ. Most recently we have reported the first triply switchable cobalt complex.