Professor Annette Taylor

Annette is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has designed and delivered a wide range of teaching activities in Chemical Engineering, including Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics,  Reaction Engineering, Modelling and Process Design. She has supervised over 50 Master’s students research projects in Engineering.

She also led modules in Physical Chemistry and was a member of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) Maths for Chemistry special interest group. She has lectured at international training schools including Systems Chemistry training schools in Vienna (Austria), 2016 and Jena (Germany) 2015; and Functional Molecular Systems (FMS) Academy masterclass lecturer (Gravitation Program – Netherlands).

Professor Annette Taylor obtained her PhD in nonlinear dynamics in chemical systems in 1999 from the University of Leeds. She took a position as lecturer in Physical Chemistry at University of Leeds in 2001, and was later RCUK Fellow, then Senior Lecturer before moving to Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Sheffield in 2014. She joined the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of Southampton as Professor of Reaction Engineering in 2024.

Her research involves complex chemical/biochemical systems and she has held research grants of > £13M from EU Horizon 2020, EPSRC, COST, Leverhulme, Innovate UK and Nuffield Foundation. She is widely published, including in leading journals such as Science and PRL, and has written News and Views articles for Nature and Nature Chemistry. She was a member of the management committee of the COST action on Emergence and Evolution in Complex Chemical Systems and a Member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science (AIP) and Advisory Board for Reaction Chemistry and Engineering (RSC).

She has been actively involved in public engagement and outreach, promoting “nature-inspired science and engineering”, including taking part in activities such as Festival of the Mind at Sheffield, public lectures – eg Science Café, and developing workshops for school children such as “Science of superheros” funded by EPSRC. She is also deeply committed to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) activities in STEM, and led a number of initiatives related to staff well-being and inclusion, as well as successful silver Athena Swan applications in 2017 and 2021.