Dr Rebecca Boston
Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Champion; WP 1.1
Rebecca is a 2016 Lloyds Register Foundation / Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship in the control of nanostructures in functional oxides. Her current research interests include functional ceramics for capacitors, thermoelectrics and batteries.
She joined the Department in 2014 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with Professor Ian Reaney and Professor Derek Sinclair.
Prior to this, Rebecca completed her PhD with Dr Simon Hall in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol through the Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials.
Prof Serena Cussen
WP 1.1
Serena obtained her BA (2002) and PhD (2007) in Chemistry from Trinity College Dublin. She completed her PhD work on New Magnetic Nanostructured Materials with Professor Yurii Gun’ko, where she developed new magnetic materials for biomedical applications.
In 2007, she began working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Materials Research Laboratory with Professor Ram Seshadri at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she studied metal-insulator transitions in vanadates.
After a lectureship at the University of Kent, Serena joined the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow as a lecturer in Physical Chemistry in 2013, was promoted to Reader in 2016 and made Professor and Chair of Energy Materials in 2018.
In October 2018, she joined the University of Sheffield as Professor and Chair in Functional Nanomaterials, as a joint appointment between the Departments of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. Her research focuses on the design, synthesis and characterization of functional nanomaterials in particular for applications in energy storage, with an emphasis on understanding their intimate structure-property interplay.
She is associate editor of the RSC journals Nanoscale and Nanoscale Advances, IOP journal Progress in Energy and sits on the editorial boards of Chemistry of Materials and Nanoscale Horizons. She was Theme Coordinator for Energy Conversion and Storage for the Scottish Energy Technology Partnership until 2018 and is a member of the Supergen Energy Storage Hub and Science board.
Serena also serves on the scientific and organising committees for a number of conferences (including the UK Energy Storage conference 2016; ISACS: Challenges in Inorganic Chemistry 2017; 16th European Solid-State meeting 2017). Serena was appointed to the EPSRC Strategic Advisory Committee in 2017, a post she will hold for three years.
She has published over 50 refereed publications, including five invited book chapters. In 2017, she was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship. She is committed to ECR mentoring, promotion of women in science and public outreach activities (>60 invited/plenary talks with upcoming Royal Institution public lecture on batteries).
Dr Eddie Cussen
WP 1.2
Dr Eddie Cussen is a Reader in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Sheffield and currently holds grants from the EPSRC, The Leverhulme Trust and Faraday Institution. He works in the material development of complex oxides such as spinels, garnets, and perovskites with a focus on materials for energy storage.
Dr Nik Reeves-McLaren
WP 1.1
Nik Reeves-McLaren obtained his BSc (Hons) in Chemistry with New Materials Technology from The University of Aberdeen in 1999, before moving to The University of Sheffield where he undertook a PhD on “Novel Cathode and Anode Materials for Rechargeable Lithium-ion Batteries”.
He was appointed as XRD Research Facility Manager in November 2003, and promoted to Research and Teaching Fellow in 2014 and then to Senior Lecturer in 2019.
Nik is one of the Principal Investigators of the new Energy Materials Research Group in the department, as well as part of the broader Functional Materials & Devices research group.