Emma McBride is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast where her research focuses on combining high intensity laser drivers with X-ray diffraction and spectroscopy techniques at hard X-ray Free Electron Lasers to understand the structure and behaviour of matter at extreme conditions.

 She completed her undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a PhD in the Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions, also at the University of Edinburgh, with Prof. Malcolm McMahon on the topic of the structure of statically and dynamically compressed materials.  Following this, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at DESY, Hamburg where she worked at the PETRA-III synchrotron and FLASH free electron laser, with a focus on shock compressed systems.

 In 2015 she was awarded the Peter Paul Ewald Fellowship and began a joint position with the HED Instrument at European XFEL and the HED Division at SLAC National Accelerator Lab, working with Prof. Siegfried Glenzer. Here, her research focused on developing platforms for combining imaging and diffraction from shock compressed matter. 

 In 2018 she was awarded the Panofsky Fellowship at SLAC National Accelerator Lab where she focused on using novel accelerator modes to understand warm dense matter. In 2021 she was awarded the US Department of Energy Early Career Award.

 In August 2022 she moved to Queen’s University Belfast after she was awarded the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship where she has established a research group in the Centre for Light Matter Interactions in the School of Maths and Physics.