Dr Mimi Hii came to Imperial as a senior lecturer in 2003, rising to reader in 2009 and now heads a group of nine postdocs and postgraduate students.

What is your research about?

It falls into the broad area of catalysis, which is a key underpinning technology for nearly every challenge posed by modern society; whether that’s low-carbon energy generation and environmental clean-up, or the production of more sustainable raw materials for use in everyday products.

What scientific achievement do you want to see in your lifetime?

My ‘beauty queen’ answer is that one day, our current energy and environmental crisis can be solved by solutions that are free and accessible to all, in a similar manner to how the web has democratised information. Personally, I enjoy the day-to- day challenges of practising science, particularly in interdisciplinary areas. I am constantly amazed by how solutions often come from the most unexpected sources, and often, the simplest solution is the best.

How do you engage external collaborators?

Mostly through my work with the Royal Society of Chemistry’s applied catalysis group and Dial-a-Molecule grand challenge network. I have also been involved in the Imperial-led Pharmacat Consortium since its inception in 2008. This is an exciting network of chemists and chemical engineers from Imperial and process chemists from five major pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies (AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Syngenta and Eli Lilly). The idea is to come up with innovative, practical, green and scalable solutions to some of the most pressing problems faced by the manufacturing industry.

To find out more about industrial collaborations in the Faculty of Natural Sciences such as the Pharmacat Consortium see the new Corporate Partnerships brochure Let’s Create a Reaction: //www3.imperial.ac.uk/naturalsciences/workingwithindustry