Professor Serena Cussen FRSC FIMMM

Serena Cussen (née Corr) is Full Professor of Materials Chemistry at the School of Chemistry, University College Dublin. She graduated in Natural Sciences before earning her PhD in Chemistry at Trinity College Dublin on the study of new magnetic nanocomposite materials for imaging applications. Her postdoctoral work at the University of California, Santa Barbara with Professor Ram Seshadri examined metal-insulator transitions in metal oxides. She began her independent academic career in the UK, becoming the first woman professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow and establishing the UK Faraday Institution's consortium for next-generation cathode materials for Li-ion batteries. Recipient of RSC Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship (2017), the ISIS Science Impact Award (2021) and the RSC Interdisciplinary Prize (2023), her research breaks new ground in the design and strategic synthesis of energy storage materials and the in-depth study of their structure and dynamics.

Serena is a passionate science communicator and educator, regularly contributing to public outreach events, with her Royal Institution lectures garnering >160K views on YouTube. She is deeply committed to career sustainability and early career mentoring. Having held positions with the UK's Faraday Institution Expert Panel and Diversity Panel, EPSRC Materials Working Group, RSC's Materials Division Council and RSC’s Equity in Publishing group, she contributed to the RSC “Is publishing in chemistry gender biased?” report and was featured in the International Women’s Day report “The Chemical Ladies”. She is the Scientific Editor of Journal of Materials Chemistry A and sits on the advisory boards of Nanoscale, Nanoscale Advances, Chemistry of Materials and Batteries & Supercaps. She is married to Eddie and they are parents to two boys.