Double award honours for Cardiff research fellow
3 July 2025
A research fellow from Cardiff University has been awarded a pair of prestigious academic prizes for her contributions to Chemistry research.
Dr Lauren Hatcher of the School of Chemistry is the recipient of the Harrison-Meldola Early Career Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Dr Hatcher, who currently holds a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, was nominated by Professor Sir Richard Catlow FRS, with Professor Kenneth Harris acting as referee.
She said: “I’m truly honoured to receive this prestigious prize and I’m grateful to the Royal Society of Chemistry and to my colleagues at Cardiff University for the nomination.
“My research is inherently collaborative and so this prize reflects the brilliance and dedication of my whole research group, past and present, and of my collaborators and mentors, without whom none of our exciting research could be done.”
Dr Hatcher is also the second recipient of the George M. Sheldrick Prize from the European Crystallographic Association (ECA), in recognition of her pioneering contributions to real time structural chemistry research for the study of light responsive materials.
Dr Hatcher’s research is centred on designing new materials that can harvest light and heat energy for solar applications.
She said: “It’s an exciting time for my area of research, which uses accelerator facilities on a very regular basis.
“The upgrades in X-ray brightness, instrumentation and software development that are happening around the world have the potential to revolutionise so many areas of structural chemistry and structural biology research. This will allow us to perform experiments and address key global challenges that would have been unthinkable even less than a decade ago.
“The future of light sources is bright indeed!”
Dr Hatcher will receive the Sheldrick Prize at an award ceremony be held at ECM35 during the Remembering George Sheldrick session on Tuesday 26 August 2025.
As a winner of the Harrison-Meldola Early Career Prize for Chemistry, Dr Hatcher receives £5,000 and will complete a UK lecture tour in 2026.
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