Natalie Banerji

Natalie Renuka Banerji is a Swiss chemist and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Bern. She studies organic and hybrid materials using ultrafast spectroscopies. She was awarded the 2015 Grammaticakis-Neumann Prize.

Early life and education
Banerji was born in Geneva, where she spent her childhood. Her mother was Austrian and her father was Indian. At school Banerji wanted to become a veterinarian, but realised that she was more interested in chemistry. Banerji eventually studied chemistry at the University of Geneva. Her doctoral research investigated photoinduced electron transfer using ultrafast (femto-second) spectroscopy. She was particularly interested in the relative geometries of the donor and acceptor materials used in photovoltaics. She has said that she was influenced by the research of Natalie Stingelin and Ursula Keller. For her postdoctoral research she moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she worked with Alan J. Heeger.

Research and career
In 2011 Banerji started her research group at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. She moved to the University of Fribourg as a Swiss National Science Foundation Professor, where she was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant. In 2015 she was awarded the 2015 Swiss Chemical Society Grammaticakis-Neumann Prize. Her research uses organic semiconductors to transduce information from biological environments. She makes use of water-soluble conjugated polyelectrolytes dissolved in biological systems to unravel their fundamental properties. To understand these processes Banerji studies the interfaces between polyelectrolytes and biomolecules, how the optical and electronic properties of organic semiconductors is impacted by exposure to aqueous environments and the process of information transduction across interfaces. In 2017 she was appointed a Full Professor at the University of Bern.