Nicole Grobert

Nicole Grobert FRSC FYAE is a German-British materials chemist. She is a professor of nanomaterials at the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and a Royal Society industry fellow at Williams Advanced Engineering. Grobert is the chair of the European Commission's Group of Chief Scientific Advisors.

Career

Grobert studied chemistry at the University of Ulm. She conducted her PhD under the supervision of Sir Harry Kroto FRS NL and D
David Walton
FRSC and received her PhD in physical chemistry for her thesis on ''Novel Carbon Nanomaterials'' from the University of Sussex in 2001 for which she was awarded the Carbon Pergamon Prize in the same year. Following a one-year post-doc in the same lab and group leader post at the Max-Planck-Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart, she was awarded th
Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship
in 2002, the Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2006, and th
Royal Society Industry Fellowship
ref>Nanomaterials for high-performance applications in F1 and Advanced Engineering (Royal Society Industry Fellowship; Nov 2016 - Oct 2020) in 2016.

In 2010, Grobert was promoted to professor of nanomaterials and made permanent at the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford. She is also a fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and a visiting professor at the BioNano Electronics Research Centre at Toyo University, Japan. Prior to her current post at Oxford, she was offered a chair at a Russell Group University and a chair (Première Classe) and directorship at a French university and research institute.

Research

As a professor of nanomaterials, Grobert her research is focused on the "synthesis, processing, and characterisation of novel carbon and non-carbon based nanomaterials, including nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanorods, graphene and other 2D nanomaterials". In collaboration with international industries, her research is geared towards engineering multifunctional hierarchical nanostructures for their application in the healthcare, the energy sectors, and in structural applications. In 2016, she led the theme ''Smart Materials'' of the International Consortium of Nanotechnologies. Grobert’s work is highly cited and has been published in over 150 articles and six patents.

Science policy, committees, and panels

Grobert is the chair of the European Commission's Group of Chief Scientific Advisors. She has also served on a number of high-level advisory committees including:

* No 10 Downing Street Round Table on Advanced Materials
* The UK Ministerial Nanotechnology Committee
* DEFRAbr>meetings on Nanotechnology

She spoke twice a
The House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee
and she has been Vice-President of the British Carbon Group. Moreover, she is a member th
Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering working group on nanotechnology
commissioned by the UK government in July 2003. which produced one of th
first reports on the opportunities and uncertainties of the Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies
in 2004.

Moreover, Grobert is a founding member of the Young Academy of Europe - an international, non-governmental association of individual scientists and scholars who are experts and leaders in their respective fields, as recognised by their peers and in 2015 she was elected to the chair of the academy. In her role as chair of the YAE she also represented the YAE at the Academia Europaea Board. Through the AE and SAPEA, the Young Academy of Europe directly engages with Science Policy and the Science Advice Mechanism at the European Level. In 2017, she has been elected to the advisory board of the Young Academy of Europe.

Selected research evaluation committees and panels include:

* The Royal Society University Research Fellowship Panel
* The Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Committee
* The Royal Society Newton International Fellowship Selection Committee
* The Royal Society Commonwealth Science Conference Follow-on Grants
* The Royal Society Robert Hooke Committee
* The World Economic Forum Future Technology Pioneers Programme Committee
* The European Commission (FET Panel, Flagship evaluation Panel)
* EPSRC Fellowship Panel
* Board Member of the Scientific Advisory Panel of the Leibniz Institute for New Materials, Saarbruecken, Germany

Engaging with industry

Over the years, as part of her research activities Grobert has also engaged with internationally leading industries. Her work features widely across the world-wide-web on blogs, in videos, and press releases about her research articles have attracted much interest and as a delegation of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skillsbr>visited Grobert’s research Laboratory in November 2015
in order to discuss challenges faced in commercialising research outputs and how government policy could help to remove barriers to industrial take-up.

Public engagement

In 2008, Grobert was invited to join the Board of Trustees of the Vega Science Trust - an educational charity, which has made and streams free on the Internet more than 300 Science programmes – 75 of which have been shown on the BBC
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