Personal Statement
Andy is a Royal Society University Research Professor (2023). He is a Nottingham graduate (1991), also obtaining his Ph.D there in 1994. After his Ph.D, he held an 1851 Fellowship and a Royal Society NATO Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, and then a Ramsay Memorial Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. In 1999, he was appointed as a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in Liverpool.  In 2007, he was the founding Director of the Centre for Materials Discovery—the forerunner of the MIF—which cemented a long-term strategic collaboration between Unilever and the University of Liverpool. He was Head of Chemistry and then the first Head of the School of Physical Sciences in the period 2007-2012, during which time he served on the University Council.  In 2017, he co-founded a spin-out company, Porous Liquid Technologies, with collaborators at Queens University Belfast, based on an entirely new class of material, porous liquids, invented in the UK as part of an EPSRC-funded project (Nature, 2015, 527, 216).
Andy led the bid to establish the Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) via the UK Research Partnerships Infrastructure Fund and he is its first Academic Director. He is also the Director of the £10 M Leverhulme Centre for Functional Materials Design. He is also co-Director, with Prof. Kim Jelfs (Imperial College) of the EPSRC hub in AI for chemistry (AIchemy). He was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Chemical Science in 2019.

Andy’s main research interests are organic materials (Nature, 2024, 630, 102), supramolecular chemistry, and materials for energy production and molecular separation. This is underpinned by a strong technical interest in artificial intelligence, computational chemistry, and robotics, in particular ‘mobile robotic scientists’ (Nature, 2020, 583, 237; Nature, 2024, 635, 890; Digit. Disc., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1039/D5DD00520E). 

A unifying theme in his research is the close fusion of computational prediction and experiment to discover new materials with step-change properties (Nature, 2011, 474, 367; Nature, 2017, 543, 657, Nat. Chem., 2025, 17, 1696). This has involved close collaboration with Graeme Day, Professor of Chemical Modelling at the University of Southampton.

Andy was elected to the Royal Society in 2015.  He has been awarded the Macro Group Young Researchers Award (2002), the RSC Award in Environmentally Friendly Polymers (2005), the McBain Medal (2007), the Corday-Morgan Prize (2009), the Macro Group Award (2010), a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, the Tilden Prize (2014), the American Chemical Society Doolittle Award (2014), the Hughes Medal (2019) and the RSC Interdisciplinary Prize for autonomous lab robotics (2021), and the Royal Society Davy Medal (2025).  He was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigators grant (RobOT), followed by an ERC Synergy Grant (ADAM). He has awarded the Interdisciplinary Prize by the Royal Society of Chemistry and Super Artificial Intelligence Leader (SAIL) Award at the 2021 World AI Conference, Shanghai. Previous recipient (2020) was IBM Research (https://tinyurl.com/4tzsb2jb). He was also awarded the Cheetham Lecture Award by University of Santa Barbara.

Research Overview
Our research focuses on the area of functional organic materials chemistry covering length scales from the atomic up to the macroscopic. Our core goal is to synthesize materials with structures and functions that are not found in other systems. We also focus on developing fundamental methods to achieve control over organic materials structure at the atomic level as a platform to enable a broad range of applications in areas such as energy. Our programme is a unique combination of computation, experiments, and robotics.

Examples of materials with unique function developed in our group include the first nanoporous polymers with extended conjugation (‘CMPs’, Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., 2007), the first permanently porous organic cages (Nature Mater., 2009), the first ‘porous liquids’ (Nature, 2015; a collaboration with Prof. Stuart James), and organic polymers and covalent organic frameworks for photochemical hydrogen production from water (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2015; Nature Chem., 2018).

We also use computational methods to design targeted functionality into organic solids by understanding and predicting the underlying molecular assembly processes (Nature, 2011; Nature, 2017; in collaboration with Prof. Graeme Day).

We are also developing new ways to automate chemistry in the Materials Innovation Factory – most recently by developing mobile ‘robotic chemists’ for autonomous experimentation

We regularly work with industry to develop commercial products and processes, this can be in the form of collaborative and contract research projects, consultancy or knowledge transfer partnerships. We have a dedicated Knowledge Exchange Scientist that manages these interactions; please contact Dr Miriam Wilson (Miriam.Wilson@liverpool.ac.uk) if you want to work with us.