Professor Mike Watkinson

Professor Mike Watkinson was appointed Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Science and Engineering in February 2024.

Prior to this, Mike was the Head of the School of Chemical and Physical Sciences at Keele University since 2018 having previously worked at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) for nearly twenty years. There he established his independent research in the design and synthesis of supramolecular architectures for a range of applications in catalysis and sensing.

Mike started at QMUL as a Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry and held a number of senior roles as Professor of Synthetic Chemistry in 2010, the Deputy Dean for Research for the Faculty of Science and Engineering 2012-18, and Director of the Doctoral College 2016-18.

Earlier in his career, having completed his first degree in Chemistry at the University of St. Andrews, Mike, moved to UMIST to undertake a PhD on the development of manganese Schiff base complexes as biomimetic models. For this, he was awarded the inaugural Laurie Vergnano Award by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1994.

Mike then moved to the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain funded by a Royal Society Postdoctoral Exchange Fellowship returning to UMIST to work on the development of routes to conformationally restricted biaryl systems and was also appointed to an honorary lectureship.

He has also published nearly 110 peer reviewed papers, patents and book chapters on his research whilst securing funding of over £7M from a range of sources.

Mike is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Chemistry FRSC, CChem.

To get in touch with Professor Mike Watkinson, please email PAtotheDFPVCofSciEng@mmu.ac.uk