Dr Fanya Ismail

Dr Fanya Ismail is a Kurdish-Iraqi chemist, inventor, and entrepreneur who was born in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq and moved to the United Kingdom in 1995. After learning English and pursuing further study, she was awarded a scholarship from the Royal Society of Chemistry and completed a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in 2003. Her doctoral research focused on interactions between dye molecules and sol-gel matrices — a line of inquiry that would eventually form the scientific foundation of the company she built more than a decade later.

In the years between her PhD and founding SGMA, Ismail worked as a researcher at Queen Mary University of London, the University of Manchester, and Kingston University before pausing her academic career to spend five years as a consultant in the legal sector. Throughout this period, she never abandoned the scientific problem she had identified: that the world needed a way to make paper substrates impermeable to liquids without using synthetic polymers. In 2012, she began designing molecules at her kitchen table with pen and paper, and was awarded an Innovate UK grant in 2014 that allowed her to return to laboratory work and begin developing her ideas.

In 2017, Ismail founded SGMA (Sol-Gel Materials and Applications Ltd) with the explicit goal of commercialising her Solgelica coating technology — a process that renders paper and other substrates impermeable to liquids and gases using silica sand extracts, with no synthetic polymers, no toxic chemicals, and full compatibility with standard recycling infrastructure. Her work was recognised with an Innovate UK 'Women in Innovation' award in 2019, an honour that led to a meeting with the Prime Minister. SGMA won the Diamond Prize at MassChallenge Switzerland 2020 and has since built a patent portfolio of over 70 global applications, all listing Ismail as inventor.

In May 2024, SGMA secured £4 million from Oaktree Capital Management to scale manufacturing and develop commercial partnerships. Ismail has previously led trials with Starbucks, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and the WWF, and has been celebrated as a pioneer in sustainable packaging materials, a female role model in STEM, and a trailblazer for Kurdish and Iraqi diaspora entrepreneurs in the UK. Her journey from a kitchen table in the UK to a funded, patent-protected company at Kent Science Park is one of the most distinctive founder stories in British cleantech.