In conversation with Serena Margadonna
Insights from a career shaped by discovery, collaboration and real-world impact.
Serena Margadonna
As an associate editor for RSC Applied Interfaces, Serena Margadonna brings a broad perspective on materials chemistry, from crystallography and multifunctional materials to electrochemical energy storage and sustainable materials design. In this interview, she reflects on the milestones that shaped her scientific career, shares her advice for early-career researchers, and discusses why interface science, scalability and sustainability will be central to the future of materials research.
Your research career has spanned crystallography, multifunctional materials and electrochemical energy storage. What have been the key milestones that shaped your scientific journey?
My background is in crystallography and solid-state chemistry. Early in my career I worked on multifunctional materials, including superconductors, molecular magnets and strongly correlated systems. One example of that early work is my Chemical Communications paper on , which is still highly cited today.
Over time, my interests moved towards electrochemical energy storage, particularly sodium-ion battery materials, while keeping the same focus on structure–property relationships. I am very fond of a from that period because it marked the start of my collaboration with industry.
What helped me was persistence, strong role models and one very simple piece of advice from a senior colleague: differentiate yourself by tackling scientific problems in your own way.
Since then, collaboration with industry has really changed the way I think. The question is no longer only how to design the highest-performing material, but whether it can be scaled up, processed reproducibly, integrated into a real device and become commercially viable. That shift became a defining milestone in my career and now shapes everything from materials synthesis to scale-up, electrode fabrication and full-cell studies. Our recent EES Batteries paper on is a good example of that.
Early in my career, being a woman in science often meant that my contribution was not taken as seriously as it should have been. Some moments were difficult. What helped me was persistence, strong role models and one very simple piece of advice from a senior colleague: differentiate yourself by tackling scientific problems in your own way. That stayed with me and shaped how I built my research group, across the whole chain from discovery to prototyping. It is also the message I now pass on to the early-career researchers I mentor: be resilient, believe in what you are doing and do not be afraid to think differently.
From an editorial perspective, what makes a piece of research genuinely memorable?
What makes a paper stand out for me is the scientific thinking behind it. The strongest papers start from a clear question, build the argument consistently, and leave the reader with a deeper understanding of the phenomena and the underlying mechanisms. Those are the papers that stay with me and often become the ones I cite. For example, recent RSC Applied Interfaces papers on and on the .
Building a research identity is about being known not just for results, but for the way you think about problems.
What are some of the most common pitfalls authors fall into when communicating their research and how can they avoid them?
A common mistake is to allow the availability of characterisation techniques to drive the narrative. Authors sometimes include a large amount of characterisation, but that does not necessarily make the science stronger. Novelty can also be overstated, or work insufficiently benchmarked against the literature, which makes the real advance harder to see. Keeping the central question in focus and benchmarking rigorously usually makes the work much stronger.
How can early-career researchers build a distinctive research identity in a fast-moving field?
Early in my career, when a new material became trendy, I would rush to publish on it. It kept me close to what was new, but later I often realised I had only scratched the surface of the real scientific questions. With time, I learned that depth and direction matter much more. Building a research identity is about being known not just for results, but for the way you think about problems. Publishing matters, especially at the beginning but in the end, it is your intellectual approach that makes you stand out.
When communicating beyond the scientific community, the science should not change, only the language you use to explain it.
What makes a research collaboration successful and how do strong scientific networks grow from that?
In my experience, the strongest research networks are built on complementary skills and realistic expectations. Whether collaborating with academia or industry, the key is to avoid overselling your capabilities. It is far more effective to be realistic about what you can contribute and then deliver high-quality results on time. A reputation for reliability is the most important tool for building and maintaining a research network.
What makes scientific communication clear and impactful, both for specialist audiences and beyond academia?
My main tip would be to decide what the one take-home message is and then stick to it. If some of the data do not directly support the main argument, they are probably better placed in the supplementary information. I also think it is important not to bury the main point under too much detail. When communicating beyond the scientific community, the science should not change, only the language you use to explain it.
What I would really like to see is materials being designed with more than just peak performance in mind.
What developments in materials science do you find most exciting right now and why?
Outside my field of electrochemical energy storage, I am particularly interested in recent advances in interface engineering for emerging devices, and in the growing push towards sustainable and scalable materials processing. Perovskite-based photocatalysts and memristive devices are good examples of where materials chemistry becomes really exciting, because it starts to connect directly with function. Recent RSC Applied Interfaces papers on and on show that clearly. I also find it very encouraging that more work is now being done on materials and processes designed with sustainability in mind from the start, including recent work on . For me, this is where the field becomes most exciting - when excellent interface science moves towards technologies that can be processed, deployed and scaled sustainably.
How is interdisciplinary thinking changing the questions materials scientists are able to ask?
I think interdisciplinary research is already changing materials science by widening the questions we ask. It is no longer enough to look at a material in isolation. Chemistry, physics, engineering and data science now need to come together if we want to understand performance, degradation, processing and application as part of the same story.
A common misconception is that once a material performs well under ideal lab conditions, the most important scientific work is done.
What challenge in materials science would you most like to see solved in your lifetime?
What I would really like to see is materials being designed with more than just peak performance in mind, thinking from the start about sustainability, processing and what happens at end of life. A true cradle to grave approach could change the field completely.
What’s one misconception about translating materials research into real-world technologies that you’d like to challenge?
A common misconception is that once a material performs well under ideal lab conditions, the most important scientific work is done. Understanding how materials behave at real interfaces, under constraints and in imperfect environments such as full-scale devices is just as crucial if we want research to have lasting impact.