Serena MargadonnaAs an associate editor for RSC Applied Interfaces, Serena Margadonna brings a broad perspective on materials chemistry, from crystallography and multifunctional materials to electrochemical energy storage and sustainable materials design.
Your research career has spanned crystallography, multifunctional materials and electrochemical energy storage.
Over time, my interests moved towards electrochemical energy storage, particularly sodium-ion battery materials, while keeping the same focus on structure–property relationships.
Building a research identity is about being known not just for results, but for the way you think about problems.
Building a research identity is about being known not just for results, but for the way you think about problems.
Serena Margadonna
As an associate editor for RSC Applied Interfaces, Serena Margadonna brings a broad perspective on materials chemistry, from crystallography and multifunctional materials to electrochemical energy storage and sustainable materials design. In this interview, she reflects on the milestones that shaped her scientific career, shares her advice for early-career researchers, and discusses why interface science, scalability and sustainability will be central to the future of materials research.
Your research career has spanned crystallography, multifunctional materials and electrochemical energy storage. What have been the key milestones that shaped your scientific journey?
My background is in crystallography and solid-state chemistry. Early in my career I worked on multifunctional materials, including superconductors, molecular magnets and strongly correlated systems. One example of that early work is my Chemical Communications paper on structural transitions in iron selenide superconductors, which is still highly cited today.
Over time, my interests moved towards electrochemical energy storage, particularly sodium-ion battery materials, while keeping the same focus on structure–property relationships. I am very fond of a Journal of Materials Chemistry A paper from that period because it marked the start of my collaboration with industry.
What helped me was persistence, strong role models and one very simple piece of advice from a senior colleague: differentiate yourself by tackling scientific problems in your own way.
Since then, collaboration with industry has really changed the way I think. The question is no longer only how to design the highest-performing material, but whether it can be scaled up, processed reproducibly, integrated into a real device and become commercially viable. That shift became a defining milestone in my career and now shapes everything from materials synthesis to scale-up, electrode fabrication and full-cell studies. Our recent EES Batteries paper on sodium-ion electrolytes is a good example of that.
Early in my career, being a woman in science often meant that my contribution was not taken as seriously as it should have been. Some moments were difficult. What helped me was persistence, strong role models and one very simple piece of advice from a senior colleague: differentiate yourself by tackling scientific problems in your own way. That stayed with me and shaped how I built my research group, across the whole chain from discovery to prototyping. It is also the message I now pass on to the early-career researchers I mentor: be resilient, believe in what you are doing and do not be afraid to think differently.
From an editorial perspective, what makes a piece of research genuinely memorable?
What makes a paper stand out for me is the scientific thinking behind it. The strongest papers start from a clear question, build the argument consistently, and leave the reader with a deeper understanding of the phenomena and the underlying mechanisms. Those are the papers that stay with me and often become the ones I cite. For example, recent RSC Applied Interfaces papers on pre-passivated lithium-ion electrodes and on the interplay between electrolyte additives and formation protocols in sodium-ion batteries.
Building a research identity is about being known not just for results, but for the way you think about problems.
What are some of the most common pitfalls authors fall into when communicating their research and how can they avoid them?
A common mistake is to allow the availability of characterisation techniques to drive the narrative. Authors sometimes include a large amount of characterisation, but that does not necessarily make the science stronger. Novelty can also be overstated, or work insufficiently benchmarked against the literature, which makes the real advance harder to see. Keeping the central question in focus and benchmarking rigorously usually makes the work much stronger.
How can early-career researchers build a distinctive research identity in a fast-moving field?
Early in my career, when a new material became trendy, I would rush to publish on it. It kept me close to what was new, but later I often realised I had only scratched the surface of the real scientific questions. With time, I learned that depth and direction matter much more. Building a research identity is about being known not just for results, but for the way you think about problems. Publishing matters, especially at the beginning but in the end, it is your intellectual approach that makes you stand out.
