Prof. Andrew B. Holmes

Andrew Holmes obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees at the University of Melbourne where he worked with Professor L.M. Jackman. His PhD (1971) on heteroannulenes with Franz Sondheimer at University College London was supported by a Shell (Australia) Science Scholarship. The transition to natural products synthesis was made as a result of a postdoctoral spell at the E.T.H. working on the final stages of the synthesis of vitamin B12 with Professor A. Eschenmoser. He was appointed to an assistant lectureship at Cambridge in 1972. In 1977 he gained tenure and was appointed to a lectureship until he took the position of Director of the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis in 1994. He was promoted to a personal Readership in 1995 and to a personal Professorship in 1998. In September 2004 he moved to become Professor of Organic and Polymer Chemistry at Imperial College and in October, 2004 was also appointed ARC Federation Fellow and inaugural VESKI Fellow at the Bio21 Institute at the University of Melbourne and at CSIRO Molecular and Health Technologies.

Professor Holmes' research interests span a range of natural and non-natural synthetic targets. In the natural products area he has concentrated on biologically active piperidine and indolizidine alkaloids, marine cyclic ethers, medium ring unsaturated lactams, and the potential application of these materials to alkaloid synthesis and novel peptidomimetics. A recent interest has been the use of phosphoinositides to probe downstream signalling processes in protein kinases, where the use of affinity matrices has in collaboration with the Babraham Institute revealed many new proteins involved in intracellular signalling pathways.

Professor Holmes developed an interest in conjugated polymers as a result of an interdisciplinary collaboration with Professor R.H. Friend in the Cavendish Laboratory. This group discovered the first polymeric light emitting diodes which have excited attention around the world and spawned a totally new research area. These materials show great promise as low voltage lightweight light sources, and may have a wide variety of applications in such fields as emergency lighting, static display panels and screens for laptop computers and portable televisions. Further potential applications of conjugated polymers in the fields of field effect transistors and solar cells are also possible.

Professor Holmes was the recipient of a Leverhulme Royal Society Senior Research Fellowship for 1993/4, the 1994 Alfred Bader Award, the 1995 Materials Science Award, the 2003 Tilden Medal and the 2004 Macro Group Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was a 1999 Novartis Fellow, the Dauben Lecturer at Berkeley in 2000 and the Aggarwal Lecturer at Cornell in 2002. His collaborations in a number of successful EU research networks led to the award of the Descartes Prize 2003. In May, 2000 he was elected FRS and in April 2006 was elected to the Australian Academy of Science. He was Chairman of the Editorial Board of Chemical Communications from 2000-2003, has served as a Principal Editor of the Journal of Materials Research (1994-2000) and as a member of the Board of Editors of Organic Syntheses, Inc., (1997-2001). Professor Holmes is currently an Associate editor of Organic Letters and is a member of the editorial advisory board of Chemical Communications, the Journal of Materials Chemistry and the Australian Journal of Chemistry.