Redesigning the world of polymers – Professor Rachel O'Reilly

"There is great current interest in the synthesis of well-defined and functional polymers using advanced polymerisation methods. The advances in the development of these techniques has enabled access to a wide range of functional and responsive materials for a diverse range of applications. In the O’Reilly group we use and develop new techniques to synthesise novel materials from a range of monomers by embedding the concepts of stereochemistry, sequence and sustainability in our polymer design."

Rachel O’Reilly is currently a Professor of Chemistry and Head of School at the University of Birmingham. She got her first degree from the University of Cambridge and went on to complete her PhD at Imperial College, London in 2003 with Professor Vernon Gibson. She then moved to the US to under the joint direction of Professors Craig J. Hawker and Karen L. Wooley. In 2006 she took up a Royal Society Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and then in 2009 she moved to the University of Warwick and in 2012 was promoted to full professor. She moved to Birmingham in 2018. Her group undertakes research in the area of catalysis, responsive polymers, nanostructure characterisation and DNA nanomaterials. She has published over 200 papers to date and has received a number of awards, including the IUPAC-Samsung young polymer scientist award in 2012, and in 2013 the American Chemical Society Mark Young Polymer Scientist award. In 2017 she was awarded the Macromolecules/Biomacromolecules young investigator award from the ACS in recognition of her innovative research in polymer science and in 2020 the RSC Corday-Morgan Prize. She is on the reviewing board of editors for Science, on the editorial advisory board of JACS and an associate editor for Macromolecules.