Name Vernon Gibson | ||
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Education California Institute of Technology, University of Sheffield | ||
Vernon Charles Gibson CB FRS (born 15 November 1958) is a British scientist who served as Chief Scientific Adviser at the Ministry of Defence between 2012 and 2016. He is Visiting Professor at Imperial College London.
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Early life
He was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire and educated at The Kings School followed by the University of Sheffield where he studied Chemistry and graduated with a First Class Special Honours degree in 1980. He studied for a DPhil degree in Oxford under the renowned inorganic chemist, Prof Malcolm L.H. Green FRS and then spent two years as a NATO postdoctoral fellow with the eminent US chemist, Prof John E. Bercaw at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Career
Gibson was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence from 2012 to 2016 and Chief Chemist at BP plc from 2008 to 2012. Prior to this he was the Sir Edward Frankland Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Imperial College London where, following foundations laid in the Chemistry Department at the University of Durham, he developed an international reputation for his fundamental studies on metal complexes and discoveries of new catalyst systems for the production of commercially relevant polymers. He has received numerous national and international awards, including the Royal Society of Chemistry Corday-Morgan and Tilden Prizes, the Royal Society of Chemistry award for Organometallic Chemistry and the Joseph Chatt lectureship. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2004 for his seminal synthetic, structural and bonding studies on metal complexes and design of novel initiators and catalysts for controlled polymer synthesis.
He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by the University of Sheffield in 2010 and appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath in the 2017 Queen’s New Years Honours list, for services to Defence.