Serena Corr

Corr grew up in Clonmel and attended Presentation Secondary School. She studied chemistry at Trinity College Dublin.[1] She completed her doctoral work on magnetic structured materials (nanoparticles and quantum dots for biomedical applications) with Yurii Gun'ko.[2] She focussed on nanomaterials that could be used for biomedical applications.[3] Corr worked on several outreach programs during her PhD. She joined the University of California, Santa Barbara, working with Ram Seshadri on vanadate metal-insulator transitions from 2007 to 2009.[1][4] She worked on rutile vanadium oxide.[4][5] They also explored molybdenum dioxide materials that demonstrated reversible lithium storage capacity.[6]

As a student, Serena was heavily involved in the Maths Department in Trinity College Dublin, acting as a course administrator for Tim Murphy's 061 Practical Computing course.

Corr was made a lecturer at the University of Kent.[1] She spent her first year writing papers and proposals for the Diamond Light Source and ISIS neutron source.[3][7] Her early work considered ways to design nanostructured materials using organometallic precursors.[8][9] She demonstrated that magnetic nanoparticles could be used as MRI contrast agents.[10] She held a visiting professorship at the University of Otago.

Corr joined the University of Glasgow as a lecturer in 2013 and was made a professor in 2018.[1] She took part in the science communication competition I'm a Scientist, Get me out of here!.[11] In 2014 she collaborated with Eleanor Schofield to conserve the Mary Rose.[12] She developed multi-functional magnetic nano-composites that could remove the iron ions within waterlogged wood.[12]

In 2013 she edited a chapter for Nanomedicine, Magnetic Nanoparticles for Targeted Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy.[13] Her group look at new insertion electrodes for energy storage.[14] These were formed from nanoparticles, which house lithium ions that can be moved between the cathode and anode.[15] She showed that shape and size of the nanoparticles can impact their electrochemical properties.[15] She uses fast microwave processing and alkoxides for continuous chemical synthesis of next generation battery materials.[15][16] In 2015 she was awarded a £1.2 million Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grant to investigate the reliability of these materials in devices.[17] This involves studying the structure of electrodes and dynamics of ion movement.[18][19] In 2017 she was made a Training Champion for the Faraday Institution, an academia - industry response to the Faraday Battery Challenge.[20][21] Her research on battery longevity and how Lithium-ion batteries degrade was covered by The Daily Telegraph.[22] In 2019 she will talk about the history of batteries at the Royal Institution.[23]

In 2017 Corr was selected as a Royal Society of Chemistry Journal of Materials Chemistry lecturer.[1][24] She joined the University of Sheffield as a chair in Functional Materials and Professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering in 2018.[25][26] She serves on the management board of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council doctoral training centre in energy storage.[27] She is an associate editor of Royal Society of Chemistry journal Nanoscale and the IOP Publishing journal Progress in Energy.[28][29]