Prof Andrew I Cooper FRS

Andy Cooper FRS is a Royal Society Research Professor. He is also the Academic Director of the Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) at the University of Liverpool, the Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Functional Materials Design, and a Co-Director of the EPSRC AI for Chemistry Hub, AIchemy. His research interests are materials, chemical synthesis, robotics, and AI.  His particular focus is organic materials, supramolecular chemistry, and materials for energy production and molecular separation. This is underpinned by a strong technical interest in automation and robotics, as embodied by the world’s first ‘mobile robotic chemist’ (Nature, 2020, 583, 237).  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; Nature, 2024, 630, 102).  He was awarded the Royal Society Hughes Medal (2019) and the RSC Interdisciplinary Prize for combining autonomous robotics with chemistry (2021). He was also awarded the Super Artificial Intelligence Leader (SAIL) Award at the 2021 World AI Conference, Shanghai – the previous recipient was IBM Research.  Since 2019, Andy has also served as Editor-in-Chief of Chemical Science, the RSC’s flagship chemistry journal.