Dr Becky Greenaway
Royal Society University Research Fellow and Associate Professor (Reader) at Imperial College London
Chemistry
Motivated by curiosity and driven by discovery, Becky Greenaway is a self-described follower of new shiny things and exciting ideas whose research centres on the potential applications of porous liquids, or “liquids with holes”.
Becky was a part of the team that first developed this new class of materials in 2015, and her work continues to explore how these seemingly impossible liquids can be used for applications like carbon capture and storage. She is also interested in whether the carbon dioxide they capture could be transformed into useful products, rather than simply being stored.
Becky believes research is a team sport. Bringing together chemists, roboticists, programmers and computational scientists, her work combines materials chemistry with automation and machine learning to help accelerate the discovery of new materials and technologies.
Alongside exploring materials that could contribute to a greener future, she has embedded sustainability into her lab practices from the outset, from using reusable equipment to reducing water and resource consumption. For Becky, building a better world is not only about the materials we create, but also how we create them.
Less driven by the why and more about the why not, Becky invites us to see something as familiar as a liquid in a completely different way, showing how curiosity-driven science can uncover unexpected possibilities and new ways of thinking about a more sustainable future.