Since the launch of lithium-ion batteries in the mid-1990s, award-winning Cambridge University chemist, Professor Clare Grey, has devoted her career to understanding how to improve the energy density and life cycle of batteries.
Clare’s success started at the University of Oxford where, whilst studying a PHD in chemistry, her work on the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) of tin materials, resulted in a paper in the famed Nature Journal. She then moved to chemical giant, DuPont, where she was responsible for discovering environmentally alternatives to the chlorofluorocarbons destroying the Ozone layer. It was here that her interest in the relationship between battery development and environmentalism grew.
Following her time at DuPont, Clare returned to academia, opening a lab at Stony Brook University in New York, where she spent several years looking at how to enhance the capabilities of primary batteries for Duracell.
Today, Clare is a Geoffrey Moorhouse-Gibson Professor of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and a founding member of the new multi-million-pound Faraday Institution – the UK’s flagship battery research programme.
In 2018, Clare and her team discovered that niobium tungsten oxide could be used to dramatically enhance the performance and lifetime of batteries. On the back of the niobium anode discovery, she co-authored the seminal 2018 paper, ‘Niobium tungsten oxides for high-rate lithium-ion energy storage’. The discovery led to the launch of Nyobolt, of which Clare is Co-Founder.
Most recently, Clare was appointed Dame Commander of The Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her services to Science in the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Birthday Honours List 2022.