Patricia Hunt (chemist)

Patricia Anne Hunt is a New Zealand chemist, and is a full professor at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in ionic bonds in liquids. In 2024 Hunt was awarded one of two New Zealand Mana Tūārangi Distinguished Researcher Fellowships by the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

Academic career

Hunt completed a Bachelor of Science, a Master of Science in physics and chemistry, a Bachelor of Arts in politics and philosophy, and a PhD titled Jahn-Teller Distortions in Molecules Containing Group 15 Elements at the University of Auckland. Hunt then undertook postdoctoral research at King's College London and Cambridge University. She was awarded a UK Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which she used to work at Imperial College London. She was made Professor of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at Imperial in 2018, and moved to Victoria University of Wellington in 2020.
Hunt researches the structure and chemical bonds in solvents and ionic liquids. In 2022 she received a Marsden grant to model the structure of ionic liquids.
Hunt is an associate investigator in the MacDiarmid Institute for Advance Materials and Nanotechnology.

In 2011 Hunt received a President's Award for Excellence in Teaching at Imperial, and in 2015 she was awarded a prize for her research supervision. In November 2024 the Royal Society Te Apārangi awarded Hunt one of two inaugural New Zealand Mana Tūārangi Distinguished Researcher Fellowships. The fellowship was awarded for work "to use quantum chemical modelling to investigate ionic liquid micro-propulsion systems for mini satellites".