Dr Emily Gabrielle Meekel PhD, MSci

• PhD in Inorganic Chemistry, University of Oxford, 2023
• MSci in Chemistry with Medicinal Chemistry, University of Glasgow, 2019

Originally from the Netherlands, Emily obtained an MSci in Chemistry with Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Glasgow in 2019. Her undergraduate research, carried out under the supervision of Professor Ross Forgan, focused on the modulated synthesis of iron-based metal-organic frameworks. During her undergraduate studies, she also spent 12 months in industry working on gold nanoparticles for drug-delivery applications.

Emily moved to the University of Oxford to undertake a DPhil (PhD) in Chemistry, supported by the Snell Exhibition. Under the supervision of Professor Andrew Goodwin, her doctoral research centred on the synthesis and characterisation of correlated disorder in metal-organic frameworks, with a particular emphasis on understanding the local structure using total scattering techniques.

Following the completion of her doctorate in 2023, Emily was awarded a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship to join the Furukawa–Inose group at the Institute for Chemical Research (iCeMS), Kyoto University. There, she worked on the design of complex porous materials using low-symmetry metal-organic polyhedra as modular building blocks.

In January 2026, Emily joined the University of Birmingham, supported by a Royal Society Career Development Fellowship and sponsored by Dr Timothy Easun. Her current research explores how structural complexity and disorder can be synthetically controlled to create porous materials with enhanced and unconventional functionality. She is also committed to promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion in the chemical sciences.

Dr Emily Meekel’s research focuses on the design, synthesis, and characterisation of complex porous framework materials, with a particular emphasis on structural disorder as a functional design principle. Her work seeks to move beyond averaged models of porous materials by understanding and exploiting local structural complexity, heterogeneity, and dynamics.

At the University of Birmingham, Emily studies how entropic effects, linker diversity, and low-symmetry building blocks can be used to stabilise and control disordered metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and related materials. A central aim of this research is to uncover how local structural variations influence macroscopic properties such as gas separation, adsorption selectivity and catalytic activity. Her work combines synthetic chemistry with advanced structural characterisation techniques, particularly diffuse scattering and three-dimensional difference pair distribution function (3D-dPDF) analysis, to probe local structure beyond the average crystallographic picture.