Professor Andrew Cooper is a distinguished Materials Chemist and global leader in functional materials design at the University of Liverpool, where he holds a Personal Chair and serves as Academic Director of the Materials Innovation Factory. He earned his PhD from the University of Nottingham in 1994 under Professor Martyn Poliakoff, conducting research on organometallic reaction mechanisms at low temperatures and high pressures. Following his doctoral studies, he held prestigious fellowships including an 1851 Research Fellowship and Royal Society NATO Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Professor Joseph DeSimone, and a Ramsay Memorial Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge with Professor Andrew Bruce Holmes. Since joining Liverpool in 1999 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow, he has established himself as a transformative figure in materials science through strategic leadership and innovative research vision.
Professor Cooper's pioneering work has fundamentally reshaped materials chemistry through the development of novel porous organic polymers with extended conjugation and molecular organic crystals exhibiting unprecedented levels of porosity, challenging conventional wisdom about material possibilities. His research program integrates organic materials, supramolecular chemistry, and advanced computational methods to create innovative solutions for energy production and molecular separation technologies. By pioneering high-throughput experimental approaches and robotics in materials discovery, he has accelerated the development cycle for functional materials while establishing new paradigms for interdisciplinary research. With over 66,000 citations, his extensive publication record demonstrates profound impact across chemistry and materials science, particularly through his groundbreaking contributions to porous materials that have redefined what is achievable in molecular design.
As founding Director of both the Centre for Materials Discovery and the £10 million Leverhulme Centre for Functional Materials Design, Professor Cooper has cemented strategic collaborations between academia and industry, most notably the long-term partnership with Unilever that pioneered the Materials Innovation Factory infrastructure. He currently leads a multidisciplinary research group of approximately 50 scientists working at the intersection of chemistry, engineering, and computer science to develop autonomous closed-loop systems for materials discovery. His current research focuses on integrating computational prediction with robotic experimentation to explore untapped chemical spaces and discover materials that would otherwise remain inaccessible through conventional approaches. Through his visionary leadership, Professor Cooper continues to drive the evolution of chemistry toward a predictive, data-driven science that promises accelerated development of next-generation functional materials for global challenges.
