Claire Carmalt is a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at UCL. She received her B.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Newcastle and was then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. She was then awarded a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship and moved to UCL in 1997. In 2016 she became the Head of Department for Chemistry and the first woman appointed to this position, which she held for 10 years. She was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) 2000 Meldola Medal, the RSC 2019 Applied Inorganic Chemistry Award and the RSC 2024 Tilden Prize for her work in materials chemistry. She is currently President of the RSC Dalton Community Council. Her research focusses on developing innovative new routes to technologically important inorganic materials including the synthesis of novel molecular precursors, deposition of films using chemical vapour, spray and atomic layer deposition, formation of superhydrophobic surfaces and deposition of transparent conducting oxide and photocatalytic thin films.