Bio

Audrey Moores is a Full Professor of Chemistry, co-lead of the Materials group of the McGill Sustainable Systems Initiative (MSSI) and associate director of the Facility for Electron Microscopy Research (FEMR) at McGill University. She serves as an associate editor for ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. In 2020 she became a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada, which is the junior body of the equivalent to a Canadian Academy of Science. In 2021 she received the Canadian Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Award for Green Chemistry.

She completed her PhD from the Ecole Polytechnique, France in 2005, under the supervision of Prof. Pascal Le Floch and received the Best Thesis award of the Ecole Polytechnique that year. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Yale University in 2006 under the guidance of Prof. Robert H. Crabtree, funded by a Lavoisier fellowship from the European Union.

She is a leading expert in the field of catalysis using metal, metal oxide and biomass-based nanomaterials, with a special emphasis on sustainable processes and use of earth abundant starting materials. She has deployed a portfolio of mechanochemical and aging-based methods to cleanly and efficiently extract chitosan from crustacean waste (Green Chem. 2019, ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 2022 & 2 active patents). This process is currently being scaled-up with a realistic prospect of commercialization. She is also developing entirely novel methods towards the synthesis of size controlled nanomaterials under solvent-free conditions. She is also studying novel photo catalysts based on plasmonic materials. Her scientific work has been published in over 113 high profile, peer reviewed publications, such as J. Am. Chem. Soc., Angewante Chemie, Green Chem., Chem. Comm., or ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. She also authored 9 book chapters, 1 book and 5 patents (>9500 citations & h-index 45 from Google Scholar). She has received over 175 invitations to present her research as research seminars or at conferences, including the keynote address at the Green Chemistry New Zealand conference (GCNZ19).

She has served as co-associate director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Catalysis, a strategic cluster funded by the Le Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (2012-2016). From 2016 to 2019, she has been the scientific director in the board of GreenCenter Canada, an Ontario-based tech transfer company. She is a member of the advisory board of the Green Chemistry Institute (America Chemical Society) since 2018 and associate editor for ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering since 2016. She is also the associate director of the Facility for Electron Microscopy Research (FEMR) at McGill since 2017. She has led three FRQNT Team Grants dedicated to clean nanomaterials synthesis and was awarded in 2017 three CFI grants to purchase circa $4M of equipment, including a state of the art transmission electron microscope. She also sits on the advisory boards of three major European research centers on green chemistry and catalysis.

Since 2017, Audrey is one of the three co-leaders of Materials group of the McGill Sustainable Systems Initiative (MSSI). She has co-created and co-organized for 5 years a workshop on sustainable innovation through green chemistry in partnership with the CREATE in Green Chemistry, the Marcel Desautels Institute for Integrated Management and the Trottier Institute for Sustainable Engineering and Design (2012-17).

She has received a number of awards, including a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Green Chemistry (2007-17), and a Discovery Accelerator Supplement Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (2018). In 2011, she was awarded a Science Communication Fellowship for Green Chemistry by Environmental Health News and Advancing Green Chemistry and has created at McGill several communication/media trainings for graduate students. In 2018, she was invited by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization to create material and teach Green Chemistry to facilitators in the form of a 5-day workshop in Pretoria (South Africa). In 2019 she received a Fessenden Professorship awarded by the faculty of science at McGill University towards the commercial development of her discovery on the clean transformation of crustacean shells into valuable biopolymer chitosan. In 2020 she was selected to be among the 250 future Canadian leaders for the Governor General’s Canadian Leadership Conference and nominated as a session co-chair. That year she also joined the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada, which is the junior body of the equivalent to a Canadian Academy of Science. In 2021 she received the 2021 CSC - Canadian Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Award for Green Chemistry.