Professor Malcolm H Levitt
Professor of Physical Chemistry
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Prof Malcolm Levitt joined the School of Chemistry at the University of Southampton in 2000, as Professor in Physical Chemistry. He is a specialist in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and the interdisciplinary study of endofullerenes.
My twin joys are magnetic resonance and endofullerenes: both topics bring one into direct contact with the quantum world.
Malcolm Levitt grew up in Hull and obtained his PhD from Oxford University in 1981, under the supervision of Professor Ray Freeman. He performed postdoctoral research with Shimon Vega in Israel and Richard Ernst at the ETH in Zürich (who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1991). He was then on the research staff at the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory at MIT, Boston, USA, for 4 years. He moved back to England as a Royal Society Research Fellow at the Centre for Superconductivity in Cambridge, before becoming a lecturer at the University of Stockholm, Sweden, where he was made a full professor in 1997. He moved back to England to take up a Professorship in Physical Chemistry at Southampton in April 2001.
Principal honours: LATSIS Research Prize of ETH-Zürich, 1985. Göran Gustafsson Prize in Chemistry, Sweden, 1996. Ampère Prize of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance, 2005. Honorary Fellow of the Indian Society of Magnetic Resonance, 2006. Adjunct Professorship of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India, 2006. Fellow of the Royal Society, 2007. Laukien Prize in Magnetic Resonance, 2008. Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance, 2008. Craig Lectureship, Australian National University, 2010. Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India, 2012. Russell Varian Prize in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, 2015. Paul Callaghan Lecture, 2019. Yusuf Hamied Visiting Professorship, 2020.
Apart from science, he composes music, plays jazz, paints and sketches, and is interested in art, languages and politics.