Rachel O'Reilly

Rachel Kerry O'Reilly is a British chemist and Professor at the University of Birmingham. She works at the interface of biology and materials, creating polymers that can mimic natural nanomaterials such as viruses and cells. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and of the Royal Society.

Education O'Reilly was born in Holywood and educated in a grammar school. She has dyslexia. She studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, working with Brian F. G. Johnson on her Master's project, and graduated in 1999. Here she demonstrated the fabrication of cross-linked polymer nanoparticles that were Click-ready. At the University of Cambridge she was awarded a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin fellowship. She developed hollow polymeric nanocages that could selectively recognise substrates.

She joined the University of Warwick in 2009 as an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council career-acceleration fellow. Her fellowship explored water-soluble responsive polymer scaffolds that contained domains for catalysis as well as responsive polymers that could trigger the release of catalysts into the media surrounding them. That year she was the first ever UK winner of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Samsung Young Polymer Scientist prize. She appeared on Start the Week with Andrew Marr in 2012, where he described her as a "a chemist who does strange things with plastics". She was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham in 2017.

Alongside her research, O'Reilly is a keen geologist and enjoys travelling to volcanoes. 2025 – Member of the Order of the British Empire, for services to chemistry 2022 – Fellow of the Royal Society 2020 – Corday–Morgan Prize 2018 – Journal of Polymer Science Innovation Award 2016 – Royal Society of Chemistry Gibson-Fawcett award 2014 – Royal Society of Chemistry and Society of Chemical Industry, McBain Medal 2013 – American Chemical Society Hermann Mark Young Scholar award 2008 – Royal Society of Chemistry Macro group UK Young Researcher medal