Dr Conrad Goodwin began work as a J. Robert Oppenheimer postdoctoral fellow at Low Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 2018. Prior to this he worked at the University of Manchester as an EPSRC Doctoral Prize fellow in the group of Dr David Mills which followed on from his PhD in the same research group. In his short career to date he has been awarded multiple fellowships to pursue research of his own devising, including an RSC Researcher Mobility Fellowship to perform collaborative research in the lab of Prof. Bill Evans at UCI, and his current position at LANL.

Dr Goodwin’s research to date is typified by the synthesis of molecules that “have no right to exist” by virtue of their extreme coordination environments or by their instability to standard conditions. This fundamental research has informed and guided the field of molecular magnetism during his PhD and 1-year fellowship at the University of Manchester, which culminated in the synthesis of lanthanide complexes with unprecedented magnetic properties. This was brought about by their highly axial ligand environment enabled by novel synthetic procedures which have spurred and guided recent further advances in the molecular magnetism community. In recognition for this work he was the recipient of the prestigious RSC Dalton Emerging Researcher Award in 2018.

Since moving to LANL, his interests have advanced across the periodic table to the transuranium elements, the manmade elements beyond uranium. His work is focused on studying electronic structures and bonding in transuranium complexes. This is a challenging and under-developed field at the intersection of synthetic and theoretical chemistry, and physics. This requires local, national and international collaboration to obtain, handle, and characterize compounds made with these highly radioactive materials.