Steve Ley

Professor Steven Ley is currently a Voluntary Research Associate at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge having been the BP (1702) Professor of Chemistry for 21 years.  He is also a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.  Steve obtained his PhD from Loughborough University with Professor Harry Heaney and afterwards carried out postdoctoral research with Professor Leo Paquette (Ohio State University) then Professor Derek Barton (Imperial College).  He was appointed as a lecturer at Imperial College in 1975, promoted to Professor in 1983, and then to Head of Department in 1989.  In 1990 he was elected to the Royal Society (London) and was President of The Royal Society of Chemistry from 2000-2002.

Steve’s research interests are varied and span many disciplines including new synthetic methodologies, the total synthesis of natural products and the development of enabling technologies for chemical synthesis especially in the area of flow chemistry technologies.  He has published over 890 papers and has gained 50 major awards including recently the ACS Arthur C. Cope Award, the Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Chemistry (Elsevier); Heinrich Wieland Prize (Boehringer Ingelheim, Germany); The Paracelsus Prize (Swiss Chemical Society); The Royal Medal (The Royal Society, London),  The Longstaff Prize (The Royal Society of Chemistry) and the IUPAC Thales-Nano Prize in Flow Chemistry.

Steve’s birthday cake!