Professor Claire Nichols completed her undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. 

After initially aspiring to be a theoretical physicist, she quickly discovered the practical side of Earth Sciences was a much better fit and particularly enjoyed field trips and the opportunities to travel to remote places. After completing an MSci in Earth Sciences, Claire remained at Cambridge for a PhD studying ‘tiny space magnets’, a type of nanoscale iron-nickel microstructure in meteorites which allows records of early solar system magnetic fields to be recovered.

Claire then moved to MIT as a Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life Postdoctoral Fellow. During her fellowship she studied lunar rocks from the Apollo missions using a combination of astronaut field geology and laboratory techniques to recover information about the ancient lunar magnetic field. She also led two field seasons to a remote part of Greenland to investigate evidence for Earth’s earliest magnetic field in the context of planetary habitability. Claire joined the Department of Earth Sciences in Oxford in the summer of 2020 and became a Tutorial Fellow at Teddy Hall at the end of 2021.