Richard Cooper

Richard is a computational chemist with an extensive career in both industry and academia successfully applying modelling technologies towards molecular optimisation.

Starting his career as chemistry software specialist at Oxford Diffraction, he then led efforts in automation of structural model building and validation as R&D Manager at oXray. His leadership role continued as Software Architect at Inhibox - which engendered Oxford Drug Design- applying molecular fragment linking tools to drug discovery projects. Since 2010 he has been Head of Chemical Crystallography in the Department of Chemistry at Oxford University where his research has focused on method development for open source crystal structure modelling tools and combining chemical descriptors, machine learning models and experimental data to enable interpretation and tuning of properties in molecular materials.

He received his BA, MA and DPhil in chemistry from Oxford where he also conducted postdoctoral work and is currently appointed as Associate Professor. He serves as President of the British Crystallographic Association and Co-editor of the structural chemistry journal, Acta Cryst. Section C.