Leroy Cronin

Leroy "Lee" Cronin (born 1 June 1973)is the Regius Chair of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, UK. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and appointed to the Regius Chair of Chemistry in 2013 (He was previously the Gardiner Chair, appointed April 2009).

Lee Croninreceived his B.Sc. (1994) and Ph.D. (1997) degrees from the University of York. From 1997 to 1999, he was a Leverhulme fellow at the University of Edinburgh working with Neil Robertson, and after that he moved to the University of Bielefeld (1999–2000) as an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow in the laboratory of Achim Mueller. In 2000 he joined the academic staff at the University of Birmingham, UK, as a Lecturer in Chemistry, and in 2002 he moved to a similar position at the University of Glasgow, UK.

He became Reader at the University of Glasgow in 2005, EPSRC Advanced Fellow and Professor of Chemistry in 2006, and in 2009 became the Gardiner Professor. In 2013 he became the Regius Professor of Chemistry (Glasgow). Glasgow is the only University to have a Regius Professor of Chemistry.

Cronin gave the opening lecture at TEDGlobal conference in 2011 in Edinburgh. He outlined initial steps his team at University of Glasgow is taking to create inorganic biology, life composed of non-carbon-based material.

He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize by the Leverhulme Trust in 2007. He was awarded the Corday-Morgan medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2012.

Lee Cronin was the subject of a film entitled Inorganica, which documents the progress of his research in inorganic biology and origins of life.

In 2014 Lee Cronin was recognised as one of the UK’s top 10 Inspiring Sciences and Engineers (RISE)as well as being recognised as one of the top 100 UK practising Sciences by the UK Science Council

In 2015 Lee Cronin gave the Royal Society of Edinburgh BP / Hutton Prize for Energyinnovation and also was named winner of the Tilden Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2015.

Cronin has published over 300 papers, given 250 lectures. He runs a large research group and holds EPSRC Programme, Platform Grants and was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant.