Rate My Professor Mimi Hii

Professor Mimi Hii, Professor of Catalysis in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London, earned her BSc and PhD in Chemistry from the University of Leeds under the supervision of Bernard L. Shaw, followed by postdoctoral research in John M. Brown's group at the University of Oxford. She holds an MA from Oxford and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), elected in 2013. Her academic career began with independent research at the University of Leeds, followed by a lectureship at King’s College London. In 2003, she joined Imperial College London as a Senior Lecturer, was promoted to Reader in 2009, and appointed Professor of Catalysis in 2016. She leads the Hii Research Group at the Molecular Sciences Research Hub on White City Campus, comprising postdocs and postgraduate students working on multidisciplinary projects.

Professor Hii directs the Centre for Rapid Online Analysis of Reactions (ROAR), funded by a multi-million pound EPSRC grant in 2017, and the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Next Generation Synthesis and Reaction Technology (rEaCt). She serves as Associate Editor for ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering since 2019 and, during her academic sabbatical from October 2024, holds a part-time role as Scientific Director at the A*STAR Institute of Sustainability for Chemicals, Energy & Environment (ISCE2) in Singapore. Her research specializes in catalysis applied to organic synthesis, focusing on efficient, sustainable chemical processes through integration of reaction technology, continuous flow methods, data sciences, and online analysis. Key contributions include developments in transient flow methodologies, catalyst leaching studies, and scalable biocatalysis, published in journals such as Organic Process Research & Development (2025, comparing DoE with Transient Flow) and ACS Catalysis (2024, catalyst leaching). She co-leads the Pharmacat Consortium with industry partners like AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and others, and participates in the Dial-a-Molecule Grand Challenge network. In 2013, she was recognized as an Asian Rising Star by the Federation of Asian Chemistry Societies.