We congratulate Prof. Julie Staunton (Theoretical Physics Group), who has received the 2025 Wohlfarth Memorial Lecturer Award from the IoP Magnetism Group. She delivered a plenary lecture at the Magnetism 2025 conference which took place in Sheffield on the 7^th and 8^th April.

Julie has been named as this year’s lecturer in recognition of her many contributions to the theory and simulation of magnetism and magnetic materials within the framework of first-principles electronic structure calculations. Some of her recent work has included the description of the subtle temperature dependence of the magnetic properties of rare earth-transition metal permanent magnets, such as SmCo₅ and Nd₂Fe₁₄B.

Julie says “It was a great pleasure and honour to give the lecture. Very early in my career I spent a year as a post-doc in Peter Wohlfarth’s group – not only was he a brilliant physicist but he was also a kind and supportive mentor to his junior colleagues.”

The Wohlfarth Memorial Lecture is jointly sponsored by the IoP Magnetism Group and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Magnetics Society UK and Ireland Magnetics Chapter. It is named after Prof. E. Peter Wohlfarth (1924-1988), who was received his PhD from the University of Leeds in 1948 for work conducted under the supervision of Prof. E. C. Stoner. Wohlfarth spent much of the remainder of his research career at Imperial College London, where he worked on a range of problems in theoretical magnetism. He is perhaps best known for his development, together with Stoner, of the Stoner-Wohlfarth model, which is still widely used to describe the magnetic hysteresis of magnetic particles hosting a singular magnetic domain.