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Michael Willis is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. He obtained his first degree in 1992 from Imperial College of London, and then moved to the University of Cambridge to continue working with S.V. Ley on his PhD ‘Studies Towards the Synthesis of Rapamycin’. He carried out post-doctoral studies with Prof. David Evans in the Department of Chemistry at Harvard University, where his research was concerned with new applications of chiral C2-symmetric copper(II) Lewis acid catalysts. He was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Bath in November 1997 and moved to Oxford in January 2007. He has been an EPSRC Established Researcher Fellow since October 2013, and was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2014 Catalysis in Organic Chemistry Award and the Syngenta, AstraZeneca and Pfizer 2015 award for process chemistry research. His research is focused on the development and application of catalytic processes to organic synthesis, and has included the development of enantioselective palladium catalysed coupling reactions, palladium catalysed heterocycle synthesis and new rhodium catalysed C-C bond forming processes.

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