Dr Amanda Barnard is an Office of the Chief Executive (OCE) Science Leader, and has been head of the Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) since 2009. She received her PhD in Physics in 2003. She was a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory (USA); a Violette & Samuel Glasstone Fellow at the University of Oxford (UK); and an Extraordinary Research Fellow at The Queen’s College.

Dr Barnard was also an Inaugural Future Generation Fellow at the University of Melbourne before joining CSIRO as an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow in 2009. Dr Barnard is an associate editor for Science Advances (American Association for Advancement of Science), a member of the Panel of Expert Advisors (Physical Sciences) for the Nature Index (Nature Publishing Group) and a member of the national Merit Allocation Scheme (MAS) Committee for the Australian National Computational Infrastructure. She is on the Advisory Board for the Centre for Theoretical and Computational Molecular Science (CTCMS) at the University of Queensland.

She has won numerous awards for her work, most recently the 2010 Eureka Prize for Scientific Research, the 2014 ACS Nano Lectureship (Asia-Pacific) from the American Chemical Society, and the 2014 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (Theory) from the Foresight Institute.