Dr Ruchi Gupta MRSC

Winner: 2021 Analytical Division early career award: Joseph Black Award

University of Birmingham

For contributions to leaky waveguides for chemical and biological sensing.

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Diverse skills and perspective brought by team members are key to making transformative discoveries and innovations.
Dr Ruchi Gupta

Currently, it is difficult to measure low concentrations of disease biomarkers in biological fluids rapidly and outside of laboratories. With their research on sensors, Dr Gupta's group aim to make an impact in this space. The sensors that they are developing use the interaction of light with biomarkers of interest to perform the measurements.

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Dr Ruchi Gupta is a Senior Lecturer at University of Birmingham. She is the recipient of an EPSRC Healthcare Technologies Challenge award and a Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Tom West Fellowship. Dr Gupta is a permanent steering committee member of the Europtrode conferences, Associate Editor of the open-access journal, RSC Advances, appointed member of the RSC’s Analytical Division Council, and elected member of the Institute of Physics' Instrument Science and Technology Group. She is keen to showcase the varied facets of analytical science to a wide variety of audiences and inspire the next generation to consider a career in STEM.

She completed her undergraduate and Master's degrees at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and McMaster University, Canada in 2005 and 2007 respectively. In 2011 she obtained a PhD from the University of Manchester where she stayed as a postdoctoral research fellow and then a RAEng Enterprise Fellow. She was Lecturer in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Hull from 2014 to 2016.

Dr Gupta and her team are developing chemical and biological sensors with applications in medical diagnostics and environmental monitoring.

Q+A

How did you first become interested in chemistry?

I first became interested in chemistry in school when we were doing experiments to identify anions and cations of unknown salts.

Who or what has inspired you?

My mother, teachers, and mentors.

Can you tell us about a scientific development on the horizon that you are excited about?

Point-of-care and wearable biosensors that can become part of people’s daily lives.

Why is chemistry important?

Chemistry is important because it underpins so much of our daily lives including our food, clothes, energy, and health.

What has been a highlight for you (either personally or in your career)?

There are many: from receiving a prize in school to becoming an independent academic and setting up my autonomous research laboratories and team.

What does good research culture look like/mean to you?

Collaborative, multidisciplinary, driven and self-motivated team members.

How are the chemical sciences making the world a better place?

Tools and techniques provided by analytical chemistry underpins pharmaceutical drug discovery and development.

Why do you think teamwork is important in science?

Diverse skills and perspective brought by team members are key to making transformative discoveries and innovations.

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Inclusion & Diversity Prize
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