Vernon Gibson is the Sir Edward Frankland BP Professor of Inorganic Chemistry. He studied for his D.Phil under Professor Malcolm Green at the University of Oxford, and then spent two years as a NATO postdoctoral fellow with Professor John Bercaw at Caltech. In 1986 he returned to the UK to a lectureship in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Durham, and was promoted to Professor of Chemistry there in 1993. He moved to Imperial College in 1995 where he became the first holder of the Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Chair of Chemistry. He presently heads the Catalysis and Materials research section.