BECKY GREENAWAY
Becky (she/her) obtained her MChem in Chemistry with Study in Industry from the University of Sheffield. During this time she worked at GSK, before working with Prof. Iain Coldham on dynamic resolutions of benzimidazoles. After working at Peakdale Molecular Ltd on custom and large-scale synthesis, she then moved to the University of Oxford for her DPhil in organic chemistry, supported by a Syngenta CASE Award, under the supervision of Prof. Ed Anderson. Her research centered on the development and optimisation of new methodologies for palladium-catalysed cascade cyclisations to access amidodienes, with the eventual application to the synthesis of the framework of the natural product. She then worked with Prof. Andy Cooper FRS as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Liverpool, where her research interests expanded to include the synthesis of porous organic cages leading to the realisation of the first molecular porous liquids in 2015. Her interests also include the use of high-throughput automation in the synthesis of molecular organic materials and supramolecular assemblies.
Becky was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2019 on “Molecular Assembly in Porous Liquids”, allowing her to establish an independent research career in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Liverpool. In May 2020 she joined the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London, and in May 2022 she secured a proleptic lectureship.
She serves on the management team for the EPSRC funded national facilities £2.75M Centre for Rapid Online Analysis of Reactions (ROAR), and the management board for ATLAS for which is a co-investigator – a new £1.3M high-throughput automation facility for materials research, and she is a co-founder and one of the automation leads in a newly launched Institute for Digital Molecular Design and Fabrication (DigiFAB) at ICL. In 2021 she also joined the early career advisory board of ChemPlusChem for which she is currently guest-editing a special issue on ‘Automation beyond the Borders of Chemistry’.
She teaches on the Y4 undergraduate CHEM97035 - Supramolecular Chemistry course (porous materials and crystal engineering), the Y3 undergraduate Emerging Technologies lab course, and is one of the leads for the Y3 synthesis lab (Synthesis 4SP),. She is also the module lead on the Automation in Chemistry, Drug Discovery and Materials course as part of the new postgraduate Digital Chemistry MSc course.
In her spare time, she spoils her two bunnies and looks after her too many plants, does various craft-based projects but never quite finishes them (ranging from cross-stitch/knitting/crochet to pottery to painting miniatures), reads Fantasy books, plays the drums, D&D and online games, and enjoys gravel cycling and mountain biking.