Robert Phipps

Robert received his MSci in Chemistry from Imperial College London in 2006, working with Prof. Alan Spivey. He moved to the University of Cambridge to complete his PhD (2010) with Prof. Matthew Gaunt on the development of new copper-catalysed arylation reactions.

In 2011, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley on a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship with Prof. F. Dean Toste in the area of asymmetric fluorination using chiral phosphoric acid catalysts. In 2013 he returned to Cambridge for the return year of the Marie Curie Fellowship and in 2014 he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which allowed him to commence independent research from October 2014. In 2017 was awarded an ERC Starting Grant,  in 2019 was a recipient of the RSC Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize and in 2023 was awarded ERC Consolidator Grant (funded by UKRI). He was appointed as an Associate Professor at Cambridge in October 2021 and made Professor of Organic Chemistry in October 2022. His group develops new strategies that utilise non-covalent interactions to solve challenges in chemical methodology. 

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