Chris Abell

Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research
University of Cambridge

A biological chemist, Professor Chis Abell FRS was an undergraduate and graduate at Cambridge, before doing postdoctoral research at Brown University. Today he leads two research teams in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Christ’s College. He was a pioneer in the development of fragment-based approaches to drug discovery, and co-founder of Astex (1999), a world leading company in this area. He has also made major contributions to the development of microfluidic microdroplets as a novel platform for experimental science, and he is a co-founder of Sphere Fluidics (2010) and Aqdot (2013). His interest in the translation of research led him to be a founding director of Cambridge Enterprise. In 2013, he became the first Director of Postdoctoral Affairs at the University of Cambridge, and in January 2016 he was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society, The Royal Society of Chemistry and the Academy of Medical Sciences.