Matthew W. Powner

I was born in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire, UK, in 1981. I obtained a first-class master’s degree in chemistry at the University of Manchester (2005), where I was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry Prize, the Degussa Award, the Sigma-Aldrich Prize, the Glaxo Prize, the Eric Braithwaite Prize, the Swan Prize and the Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) Award. I then completed a medicinal chemistry internship at AstraZeneca, Alderley Park, before returning to Manchester to complete my Ph.D. (2009) and an EPSRC Doctoral Prize post-doctoral fellowship with John Sutherland FRS. In 2009 I was awarded a Harvard Research Fellowship to work with Nobel laureate Jack Szostak FRS at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA.

I returned to the UK in 2011, joining UCL as a lecturer in the chemistry department, where I am currently Professor of Organic Chemistry and an Investigator of the Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Origins of Life.

I have been awarded various prizes and fellowships in recognition of my research, including the ISSOL Stanley Miller Award (2011), the UK Parliamentary & Scientific Committee's SET for Britain (Gold Award) Roscoe Medal (2012), first prize in the Origins of Life Challenge (2012; jointly with John Sutherland FRS), an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship (2013), a Bürgenstock JPS Fellowship (2015), the Thieme Chemistry Journal Award (2015), a Center for Advanced Studies Fellowship (2016), the Royal Society of Chemistry Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize (2019), Blavatnik Award Honoree (2021) and the Royal Society of Chemistry MSD Prize (2024).