Joanne Roberts
Research Fellow
Department of Applied Science
Dr Joanne Roberts is a Research Fellow in Applied Sciences in the School of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment. Having worked in the pharmaceutical industry for many years in medicinal, process and analytical chemistry she moved into academia and environmental chemistry in 2011.
Joanne submitted her thesis titled “Determination and Identification of Drug and Chemical Metabolites in Waste Water by LCMS/MS” in 2017. She is an active researcher and has a wealth of expertise in organic chemistry, chromatography and high resolution mass spectrometry. Her interests are the analysis of micropollutants such as pharmaceuticals and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in environmental matrices.
She has been involved in several international environmental projects including the PILLS, noPILLS and Phos4You projects. She currently has a collaboration with UFABC in Brazil analysing perfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) and how they break down in soil and water.
Her teaching roles include developing under-graduates for industry and enhancing their practical skills. She also trains post-graduate students in quantitation of micro-pollutants using hyphenated techniques.
Joanne is a Chartered Chemist with the Royal Society of Chemistry and a member of the British Mass Spectrometry Society.
She is also interested in replacing plastics with natural materials for the circular economy and developing environmental sensors.