Stuart Macgregor

Stuart Macgregor Professor and Head of Institute of Chemical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, UK

Webpage: http://www.che.hw.ac.uk/cic/group.html Stuart Macgregor was born in Edinburgh in 1966 and received his BSc (1988) and PhD (1992) from the University of Edinburgh. His PhD was obtained under the supervision of Prof Alan Welch and Prof Lesley Yellowlees and concerned structural, electrochemical and spectroscopic studies of metallaboranes. In 1992 he won a NATO Western European Fellowship to work with Prof Odile Eisenstein at the Université de Paris-Sud in Orsay and he subsequently spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra. In 1997 he returned to Scotland take up a lectureship at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. He was promoted to a chair position in 2009 and has been Head of Institute since 2010. Stuart Macgregor's current research uses computational chemistry to model the chemical structure and reactivity of transition metal systems, often of relevance to homogeneous catalysis and metal-mediated organic synthesis. He is particularly interested in bond activation processes, especially those involving challenging C-H and C-F bond cleavage. Techniques employed are based on high-level quantum mechanics, primarily density functional theory and hybrid QM/MM approaches. Most of his work is performed in close collaboration with experimentalists.